Employee Well-Being Under Corporate Psychopath Leaders

Abstract

This chapter reports on twenty-one in-depth interviews in the UK and USA with corporate employees who were currently working or had previously worked with a toxic leader in the form of a corporate psychopath. This is thus a chapter that is concerned with the impact on well-being of working with a corporate psychopath. Corporate psychopathy was defined using a measure of psychopathy involving proto-typical characteristics such as lying, cheating, egocentricity, emotional unresponsiveness and grandiosity. A contribution of the chapter is that it answers the call for research which links the destructive leadership literature with employee well-being. Research participants in both countries reported that their wellbeing was affected by psychopathic leadership, with reports of stress-related illnesses and depression, including suicidal thoughts. The chapter concludes that corporate psychopaths, in both the UK and USA, appear to have a similar protocol for achieving their objectives and achieve similar results. This protocol involves using loud, regular, public bullying combined with threats of violence to create a fearful, cowed and compliant workforce who can the more easily be manipulated and controlled by the abusive corporate psychopath. Research participants in both the USA and UK suffered from severely reduced well-being because of this common experience.