WEBVTT

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[Bullying and Corporate Psychopaths
at work]

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Right. Hello, everybody. I'm here
to tell you a bit of a story about

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why I got interested in the link between
corporate psychopaths and bullying.

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A long time ago, in a land far away,

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I was running a business
in the Far East,

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and, as a part of that,
I was moved offices.

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And when I was moved offices,
I was told I was getting a new boss.

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And various people
came up to me and said,

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"You have to be careful about this
new guy, this new boss you're getting.

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He's very manipulative,
he's very ruthless, very cunning,

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and he's almost downright evil.

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So, I thought, hm, this guy sounds
like a bit of a monster, a bit of a devil.

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And when people say things like
that to you, that's what you expect.

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You expect to meet a monster.

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What you actually meet
is an utterly charming man,

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in a well-cut suit,
who looks very attractive.

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He's very sociable, very extroverted
and he doesn't look like a monster at all.

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He looks like your next best friend.
And so, you get confused.

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Then you think that these people
must have been wrong.

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"He's not a monster, he's a nice guy.

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I'm going to really enjoy working
with this person."

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Looking back years later,
people would say to me,

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"Well, how did you end up in
the circumstances that you ended up with?"

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And I could never answer that,
until I read about corporate psychopaths.

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And then it all clicked together.

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So, that's my personal reason
for getting involved in psychopathy

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and corporate psychopaths.

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And, as I started to read about bullying
as a different part of my academic job,

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I realized there's probably
a large area of crossover

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between bullies and psychopaths
in the workplace.

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So, I started to look at bullying itself.

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It's usually described as being
the regular and repeated belittling,

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or humiliating, or, in some way,
intimidating a person,

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and it's usually a single person,
in the workplace,

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on a regular basis, as I said.

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So, it involves things like regular
conflict, arguments, yelling,

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rudeness in the workplace,
directed at a single person.

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It seems to be all over
the place, basically.

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If you look at the papers
to do with bullying,

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it seems to be in every organization,
and significant numbers of people

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have experienced it. Usually
it's in the 30 and 40 percentages.

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And even organizations like

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the Departments of Consumer
and Employment Protection,

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in Western Australia,
where I was at the time,

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whose job is to prevent bullying,

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were accused by their own staff
of having a culture of bullying.

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And the staff insisted that they
bring in private investigators

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to investigate the bullying
that was going on in the organization, 


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that was there to prevent bullying.
So, it's all over the place.

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So, that made me think,
"But, why? Why is it all over the place?"

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And the other thing that struck me
in reading about it

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is that companies and corporations
and organizations

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don't seem to know what to do about it.

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They tend to want to sweep it under
the carpet, to pretend it doesn't exist.

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And quite often, they'll do things like,

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they'll pay off the people
who are being bullied,

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and they'll insert a clause into that payoff,
into that contractual arrangement,

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whereby they're not allowed
to talk about it.

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So it all gets swept under the carpet.

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The bully, in the meantime,
gets promoted,

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and they're the only one that's
left in the organization.

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But there are many ethical
and financial reasons

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why bullying should not be swept
under the carpet,

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and some of these are to do
with individual reasons.

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So, the negative effects,

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the psychological effects on the individual
concern are quite devastating.

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So, they feel humiliated, belittled,

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their careers quite often
get ruined or disjointed.

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They'll try and withdraw
from the workplace,

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they'll seek other jobs,

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and they end up in lesser positions,
or unemployed,

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or in jobs they don't really want to do.

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And their confidence and motivation
is destroyed at a personal level.

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But it also has an effect at a corporate
level or an organizational level as well,

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because there's a typical
fight-or-flight response to being

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in a conflict situation
or to being bullied.

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So, in terms of flight,

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people withdraw
their time and effort.

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So, they'll stop doing overtime, they'll
stop their extracurricular activities,

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in terms of commitment to the organization
and helping the organization grow.

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And they'll fight back

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in terms of things like
counterproductive work behavior.

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So, typically, if the bully
is your manager,

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or your supervisor,
or your boss in some way,

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you take him or her
as a representative of the company.

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And, therefore, your revenge is not
on them particularly, as an individual.

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It tends to be against the company.

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So, you'll stop working properly,
you'll sabotage normal work processes,

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you'll withdraw your effort and your
commitment, as I said, to what you're doing.

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And the result of all that is just
further conflicts within the organization.

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The ethical and moral climate
of the organization starts to diminish,

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and that has knock-on effects in terms
of how you treat your suppliers,

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how you treat your tax returns
and everything else to do with the company.

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So, reading some of the literature
on bullies and bullying,

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there seems to be a sort of unspoken,
underlying sense of bewilderment,

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"Who are these people?

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Who are these people
that enjoy watching people get hurt?"

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'Cause it doesn't seem
a normal thing to do,

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a normal thing to want to do or to enjoy
doing, and they clearly enjoy it.

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Reading about bullies,

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the words that are used to describe them
are on the screen there.

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So, they enjoy hurting other people,
they're cruel, they're selfish,

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they're parasitic, Machiavellian,

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and you start to get in the literature
a lot of words

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to do with a dissocial personality.

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So, antisocial personality disorder,
sociopathy, psychopathy

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and lots of these words
are similar to words

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used to identify corporate psychopaths.

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Well, corporate psychopaths
are those psychopaths

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who are about 1% of the population,

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and just by the way, who go into
organizational and corporate positions,

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rather than into a criminal career.

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And psychologists have slowly
come to realize

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that those from better socioeconomic
backgrounds, perhaps with a good education,

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good family background, work out
fairly early, that it's far easier

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to get the power, the prestige,
and the money that they want

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from a corporate career
than it is from a criminal career.

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And so, they go into
the corporate world.

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So, the same words are used
to describe them, these psychopaths,

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as I used to describe bullies,
with the exception that psychopaths,

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the outstanding thing about psychopaths
is they have absolutely no conscience.

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So, there's nothing that inhibits them,
in terms of how they behave.

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They can be totally ruthless
and sleep perfectly well that night,

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because nothing they do bothers them,
because they don't have a conscience,

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and there's no feeling,
no emotion in their lives.

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So, having realized that there's
probably a large link

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between psychopathy and psychopaths
and bullying,

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I thought it would be interesting
to do some research

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to see how large that link actually is.

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So, I took a psychopathy measure

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from reading 200 and odd psychology
papers on psychopaths,

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and embedded it
in a management survey

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of management behavior,
firstly doing this in Australia.

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And what I found was one
of the most outstanding things.

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I found that psychopaths

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seemed to account for around 26%
of all bullying

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in that particular sample of managers,
of Australian managers.

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It was 346 managers,
research carried out in 2008, I think.

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And there were quite a few other
interesting statistics there, as well.

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I mean, under normal managers,

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employees encountered bullying
less than once a month.

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If there were corporate psychopaths
in the organization,

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then bullying went up to
more than once a week.

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1.3 times a week,
I think it was.

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- And I measured lots
of other things as well, besides bullying,

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but that was the interesting thing
for the purposes of today -

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Because those results were so dramatic,
I repeated it again in the U.K.

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And - Let's get the right slide.
That one -

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And I found even more bullying
in the U.K. than I found in Australia.

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And I found that psychopaths
and corporate psychopaths

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were accounted for more of that bullying
than they did in Australia.

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So, up to 36% of all bullying is down
to the presence of corporate psychopaths

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in an organization, in this sample.

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And the knock-on effects,
more yelling, more arguments,

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more disruption, more conflict,
then, when psychopaths are there,

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compared to when they're not there.

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So, under normal managers,
everything is, in terms of conflict,

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everything is lowered,
and much more sedate,

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and much more smooth,

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and much less chaotic,
and less confusion.

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So...
Where are we?

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In conclusion, I think that what I've —

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Having established the link between
corporate psychopaths and bullying,

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it starts to explain some of the big
questions that are to do with bullyings.

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For example, why is it so pervasive
in all companies,

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around the world and in all countries?

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Well, the answer to that might be that,

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because psychopaths are 1%
of the population.

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If we assume they are normally
distributed across the whole population,

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then, in every major company
there will be psychopaths.

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And if there are psychopaths,
there will be bullying.

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So, that explains why bullying
is so common.

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The other thing it explains is
why bullying occurs in the first place.

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Psychopaths bully for two main reasons.
One of them is predatory.

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So they do it because they like it.
They do it because they enjoy it.

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They do it because they like
to see people squirm.

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They like just to hurt people,
they like to damage their careers,

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and that's the thing that's hard
for the rest of us to understand.

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It's enjoyable. That's one
of the reasons they do it.

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The other reason they do it is
what I've called instrumental bullying.

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So, they're doing it quite often to create
confusion and chaos all around them,

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so that they can forward their own
political and social and career agendas,

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while everybody else
is emotionally distracted.

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So, it creates a smokescreen for them
to get on with what they're really doing,

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which is gaining power, and influence,
and prestige,

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and money within the corporation.

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So, anybody, for example, a boss
looking down on this whole situation

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of bullying and emotional reactions

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will see that the only person that seems
to have kept their cool is this psychopath,

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because he started it all
in the first place.

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And therefore, the only person
that seems like they want...

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deserves promotion is the psychopath.

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So, that's why it helps
to answer the question

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of why psychopaths seem
to get promoted at the hierarchy

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more than ordinary people do.

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Because they create
confusion around them

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and that enables them to forward their
own agenda to promote themselves.

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So, if you link it
at an organizational level,

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companies like Enron, which was
the biggest fraud in history at the time,

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before the global financial crisis
and things like that,

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was reported to have a culture
of bullying within it.

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And they bullied their agencies,
they bullied their advisers,

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they bullied their suppliers to keep them
in check and to stop them asking questions,

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so that they could perpetuate this massive
fraud that was going on for years.

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So, it's a means to an end,
as well as an end in itself.

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And I think bullying in corporate banks,
for example,

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and linking it to the global
financial crisis, was very evident as well.

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There is a culture of, "Don't ask questions,
or you'll get into trouble."

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So, no ethical questions
are allowed in these institutions,

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and it enables them to get on
with what they're doing, with their fraud,

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and it prevents people from exposing it.

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If anyone is interested in finding out
more about any of these things,

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those are the things to look up
in your search engine.

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Thank you for listening.
Goodbye.

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(Applause)