Bullying and Corporate Psychopaths at Work: Clive Boddy at TEDxHanzeUniversity

Translated by: Valérie Boor Reviewed by: Christel Foncke Good. Hello everyone. I'm here to tell you what interested me in the link between

corporate

psychopaths

and

bullying

. A long time ago, in a far away country, I had a company in the Far East. Before that I moved to another office. There they told me that I had a new boss. Several people came up to me and said, "You have to be careful with that new guy, that boss of yours. He's very manipulative, ruthless, devious, and almost downright evil. I thought, hmm, that guy sounds a bit like a monster, a demon.

When people say those things to you, you expect to meet a monster. In reality, he is an extremely charming man, with a well-cut suit and a very attractive appearance, outgoing and does not look like a monster at all. best friend. You get confused and think those people are wrong "He's not a monster, he's a good guy." Looking back years later, people would say to me, "How could you get into that situation?" I could never answer that until I read about

corporate

psychopaths

. Then everything fell into place. Therein lies my personal motivation to

work

on psychopathy and corporate psychopaths.

When I started reading about

bullying

in my other academic

work

, I realized that there is probably a lot of overlap between bullies and psychopaths in the workplace. It is usually described as regular and repeated disparagement. humiliating or in some way intimidating someone, usually an individual, in the workplace on a regular basis, as I said, includes things like regular conflicts, arguments, yelling, rudeness in the workplace, directed at a single person. It seems to happen everywhere. If you look at articles about bullying, it seems to occur in a large number of people: usually between 30 and 40 percent. Even organizations like the Employment and Consumer Protection Departments in Western Australia, where I was at the time, whose job it is to prevent harassment, their own staff said they had a culture of harassment.

The staff insisted that they employ detectives to investigate bullying in the bullying prevention organization. That's how it happens everywhere. That made me think, "Why? Why does it happen everywhere?" Reading about this, I noticed that companies, corporations, and organizations don't seem to know what to do about it. What they want most is to sweep it under the rug, pretend it doesn't exist. And very often they pay compensation to people who have been harassed and add a clause in the contract to that payment that states that they are not allowed to talk about it. Everything is swept under the rug.

Meanwhile, the bully gets a promotion. That's the only one left in the company. But there are many ethical and financial reasons why harassment should not be swept under the rug. Some of them have personal reasons. The negative effects, the psychological effects on those involved, are quite devastating. They feel humiliated, belittled, and their careers are often ruined or interrupted. They will try to withdraw from the workplace, look for other jobs, and end up in inferior positions or unemployed, or in jobs they really don't want to do. Their self-confidence and motivation as a person are destroyed. But it also has an effect at the corporate or organizational level, due to the standard fight or flight response in conflict situations and harassment.

Escaping means that people reduce their time and effort. They stop working overtime and stop their extracurricular activities in terms of involvement in the organization and its growth. And they will fight back. This can cause them to behave counterproductively at work. In many cases, if the harasser is your manager, supervisor, or boss in some way, he or she will see you as a representative of the company. Therefore, your revenge will not so much be against him personally, but usually against the company. You stop working correctly and sabotage normal work processes. You are withdrawing your effort and your dedication from your work, as I said.

As a result, more conflicts arise in the organization. The ethical and moral climate of the organization decreases, which affects the way you deal with your suppliers, handle your tax returns and everything related to the company. After reading the literature about bullies and bullying, one gets a kind of underlying sense of bewilderment: "Who are these people? Who are these people who enjoy human suffering?" Because it doesn't seem normal to me to do this, want to do it or enjoy it. And they clearly enjoy it. When you read about bullies, they are described with these words on the screen.

They enjoy the suffering of others, they are cruel, selfish, parasitic, Machiavellian, and many words are beginning to appear in the literature on antisocial personality: antisocial personality disorder, sociopathy, psychopathy, and many of these words are similar to words used to describe others. corporate psychopaths. Corporate psychopaths are those psychopaths, around 1% of the population, who simply take positions in organizations or the corporate world rather than pursuing a criminal career. Psychologists are slowly beginning to realize that those who come from better socioeconomic backgrounds, perhaps with a good education or family background, soon discover that it is much easier to obtain the power, prestige, and money they desire through through a corporate career than through a criminal career.

They go into business. The same words I used to describe them, these psychopaths, I used to describe bullies, except that psychopaths have one notable characteristic: that they are absolutely unscrupulous. So there is nothing inhibiting their behavior. They can be absolutely ruthless and still sleep soundly at night, because nothing bothers them, because they have no conscience and there is no feeling or emotion in their lives. I realized that there must be a clear link between psychopathy, psychopaths, and bullying, and I thought it would be interesting to investigate how close that similarity really is. I took a measure of psychopathy from over 200 psychology articles read about psychopaths and included it in a management survey on managerial behavior.

I did it for the first time in Australia. And I discovered something very remarkable. I found that psychopaths accounted for 26% of all bullying in that particular sample of Australian managers. There were 346 managers, surveyed in 2008, I believe. There were quite a few other interesting statistics. For example, with typical managers, employees experienced harassment less than once a month. If there were corporate psychopaths in the organization, the harassment increased to more than once a week. 1.3 times a week, I think. Besides harassment, I measured many other interesting things, but this was the interesting one for our purpose today. Because the results were so extreme, I repeated it in the UK.

The correct image, this is it. I found even more harassment in the UK. than what he had found in Australia. I found that psychopaths and corporate psychopaths were responsible for more harassment than in Australia. In this example, up to 36% of all harassment was due to the presence of corporate psychopaths in an organization. The resulting effects: more shouting, more arguing, more disruption, more conflict, compared to when they are not present. Under normal managers, there is much less conflict, things are much calmer and things run much more smoothly and are less chaotic and with less confusion. So where are we?

I guess the bottom line is that I showed the link between corporate psychopaths and bullying. This begins to explain some of the big problems with bullying. For example: why is it so common in all companies in the world and in all countries? The answer could be that, because psychopaths make up 1% of the population, and if we assume that they are normally distributed throughout the population, then there will be psychopaths in all large companies. And if there are psychopaths, there will be bullying. That explains why bullying is so common and it also explains why bullying happens. Psychopaths bully for two reasons.

The first is predation. They do it because they like it and because they enjoy it. They do it because they like to see people shrink. They just enjoy hurting people, damaging their careers. That is what others among us find difficult to understand. Make it enjoyable. That's one of the reasons they do it. The other reason they do it is what I called "instrumental bullying." They do this quite frequently to sow confusion and chaos around them so that they can pursue their own political, social, and professional agendas while everyone else is emotionally distracted. A smokescreen is then created so that they can continue doing what they are really doing, which is accumulating power, influence, prestige and money within the corporation.

If someone, a boss for example, evaluates this whole situation of harassment and emotional reactions, he sees that this psychopath is the only one who seems to have remained calm, because he started it all. That's why it seems that the only one who deserves a promotion is the psychopath. That's why it seems that the only one who deserves a promotion is the psychopath. Therefore, it helps answer the question of why psychopaths within the hierarchy seem to be promoted more often than normal people. Because they create confusion and therefore can follow their own agenda to promote themselves. The similarity you see at an organizational level in companies like Enron, which was the biggest fraud to date, before the global financial crisis and the like, is that there was supposedly a culture of bullying.

They threatened their agencies, their consultants, and their suppliers to keep them quiet and not ask questions so they could continue this massive fraud for years to come. Therefore, it is both a means and an end in itself. For example, I think it was very evident to link harassment at investment banks to the global financial crisis. There's a culture of, "Don't ask questions or you'll get in trouble." Therefore, ethical questions are not allowed in these institutions. That gives them room to continue with what they are doing, with their fraud. Prevent people from exposing it. If anyone is interested in learning more about this, search: Thanks for listening.

Bye bye. (Applause)