Examples of detrimental effects include increased bullying, conflict, stress, staff turnover, absenteeism, and reduction in both productivity and social responsibility.
[3] A 2017 UK study found that companies with leaders who show "psychopathic characteristics" destroy shareholder value, tending to have poor future returns on equity.
[5] Criminal psychologist Robert D. Hare coined the term "snakes in suits" as a synonym for workplace psychopaths.
[6] Oliver James identifies psychopathy as one of the dark triadic personality traits in the workplace, the others being narcissism and Machiavellianism.
[12][13][better source needed] Psychopaths aim to reach the very highest levels of their organizations, allowing them to control the greatest number of people.
They have low patience when dealing with others, display shallow emotions, are unpredictable, undependable and fail to take responsibility if something goes wrong that is their fault.
Their thrill-seeking tendencies may be conveyed as high energy and enthusiasm for the job or work and skilled interviewers must strive to unravel the misconstrued to know and understand specific to the interviewees intentions.
[24] For instance, psychopaths may create fictitious work experiences or resumes and skeptical high performers can easily discern such fiction.
[27] Boddy identifies the following bad consequences of workplace psychopathy (with additional cites in some cases):[2] Boddy suggests that because of abusive supervision by corporate psychopaths, large amounts of anti-company feeling will be generated among the employees of the organisations that corporate psychopaths work in.
[2] Psychologist Oliver James has described the credit crunch as a "mass outbreak of corporate psychopathy which resulted in something that very nearly crashed the whole world economy".
[34] For example, during this financial crisis, the behaviour of some key people at the top of the world's largest banks came under scrutiny.
CEO Fred "the Shred" Goodwin was known for taking excessive risks and showing little concern for his mismanagement, which led to the bank's collapse.
Goodwin's demeanour toward colleagues was unpredictable and he is said to have lived a luxury lifestyle while fostering a culture of fear.
[5] Using meta data analysis on hundreds of UK research papers, Boddy concluded that 36% of bullying incidents were caused by the presence of corporate psychopaths.