Lideres Sin Ética

Journal of Public Affairs J. Public Affairs 10: 121–138 (2010) Published online 4 June 2010 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/pa.352

Leaders without ethics in global business: corporate psychopaths
Clive R. P. Boddy 1,2*, y, Richard Ladyshewsky 3 and Peter Galvin 3
1 2

Department of Marketing, University of Lincoln, UK Department of Marketing, MiddlesexUniversity, UK 3 Graduate School of Business at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia



This paper introduces the concept of Corporate Psychopaths as ruthless employees who can successfully gain entry to organizations and can then get promoted within those organizations to reach senior managerial and leadership positions. What little empirical research currently existssupports the view that Corporate Psychopaths are more commonly found at senior levels of organizations. This paper presents further empirical evidence that supports this view. It discusses how, in a quantitative sample of 346 whitecollar workers, in 2008, research using a psychopathy scale identified greater levels of psychopathy at more senior levels of corporations than at more junior levels. The papergoes on to propose that this is a universal issue that can pose various ethical problems for corporations because of the ruthless, selfish and conscience-free approach to life that Corporate Psychopaths have. Other ethical issues are to do with their moral accountability and with the problems associated with the possibility of screening employees for psychopathy. The paper reviews the literature onpsychopathy and concludes that while psychopaths appear to be universal in occurrence, they may well be environmentally limited in their possible actions in more collectivist societies. However, the global spread of western, individualistically oriented corporations may pose a threat to any collectivist societies in which they operate. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

IntroductionCommentators on business ethics have noted that corporate scandals have assumed epidemic proportions and that once great companies have been brought down by the misdeeds of their leaders. These commentators raise the intriguing question of how resource*Correspondence to: Clive R. P. Boddy, 125 Waratah Avenue, Dalkeith, Perth, Western Australia 6009, Australia. E-mail: crpboddy@gmail.com y VisitingProfessor at University of Lincoln and Honorary Visiting Professor at Middlesex University.

ful organizations end up with impostors as leaders in the first place (Singh, 2008). One writer on leadership goes as far as to say that modern society is suffering from a plague of poor leadership in both the private and public sectors of the economy (Allio, 2007). An understanding of Corporate Psychopathshelps to answer the question of how resourceful organizations end up with impostors as leaders. This is discussed below. Psychopaths are people without a conscience who often end up in prison (Hare, 1999). They are one of the most studied of all
Journal of Public Affairs, August 2010 DOI: 10.1002/pa

Copyright

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2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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people withpersonality disorders and a wellestablished, valid and reliable method for identifying them exists, the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991). This checklist is used around the world and has been called the gold standard tool for assessing and identifying psychopaths (Edens, 2006; Mahmut et al., 2007). If Corporate Psychopaths ended up in corporate leadership positions, this would beexpected to cause very poor levels of ethical decision making within corporations. Recently, psychologists have come to understand that a type of psychopath exists who is not prone to violent, criminal behaviour and who therefore operates relatively undetected and successfully in society (Levenson, 1993; Paul Babiak, 1995; Cooke et al., 2004b; Board and Fritzon, 2005). They have been called...