Identifying the work place psychopath

Dr X even had clones from the endangered middle management species, who, like creatures out of a 1950s science fiction movie, started to act and speak like him. They exhorted us to be team players.

“There’s no ‘I’ in team", the clones would yell to which I’d reply “but there’s two ‘i’s in ‘salary differential’." No wonder I never made it in advertising.

 The Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Harvard University, Chris Argyris, says that every organisation is replete with “undiscussables” - the messy stuff that people don’t want to talk about such as bullying, mental illness, sexual harassment and drug addiction.

Worse still, the undiscussability is in itself undiscussable, which creates a group mentality that ensures no one will rock the boat. Usually it takes external events such as whistle blowers, corporate collapses or litigation to bring these dirty little secrets out in to the open.

Should we not admit to a strange, perverse fascination in the Dr X’s of the world in much the same way that Shakespeare characterised Richard the Third? A character who was without any redeeming qualities and who left a trail of destruction in his wake.

It is difficult not to shake the feeling that the characteristics that comprise the organisational psychopath are not, in some form, prized in corporate boardrooms because they brook no resistance to change. Like a hound after a hare, the psychopath is single minded in his or her pursuit.

Admittedly the organisational psychopath is in the minority. Yet they are living personifications of the worst aspects of organisational life: unbridled power, toadyism, guile and malice aforethought. They are successful tyrants.

When the pursuit of power becomes the bottom line, ethics seem pale things - or are they?

The social theorist Richard Sennett said in The Corrosion of Character that “Character is expressed by loyalty and mutual commitment or through the pursuit of long-term goals, or by the practice of delayed gratification for the sake of a future end ... Character concerns the personal traits which we value in ourselves and for which we seek to be valued by others.”

The workplace psychopath can never share in the respect of others or naturally give esteem. It may seem old fashioned but there is still dignity in labour, in putting in a hard day’s work. For whatever reason, for whatever cause, the workplace terrorist has cut himself off from one simple aspect of work - the fraternity and collegiality of working together.