Corporate Psychopath – Meaning, Signs, Effects and Amelioration Approaches

Abstract

There have been musings on why organizational performance is declining, or why employees, especially key employees are leaving. On a wider note, there can also be preponderances on why head of states are managing their countries poorly. One of the multiple reasons can be the presence of a “psychopath” as the head of an organization or even as a head of state. In the context of an organization, this individual can be called as, among other terms, an industrial psychopath, executive psychopath, organizational psychopath or a corporate psychopath (Boddy, 2014, p. 107).

Corporate psychopath, as the term used here in the context of organizations warrant some discussion as organizational success or otherwise is partly or wholly contingent on the leadership or absence of it in an organization. If a chief executive or directors happened to be corporate psychopaths, then the organization’s performance will head southwards and this will cause agency conflict with the organization’s stakeholders and shareholders in particular. Therefore it is important to be aware of the presence of a corporate psychopath in the midst of a board of directors or taken in a wider context, in the presence of a cabinet of ministers running a country.