Corporate Psychopathy: can ‘search and destroy’ and ‘hearts and minds’ military metaphors inspire HRM solutions?

Abstract Corporate psychopathy (CP) thrives as perhaps the most significant threat to ethical corporate behaviour around the world. We argue that Human Resources Management (HRM) professionals should formulate strategic solutions metaphorically by balancing what strategic military planners famously call ‘Search and Destroy’ (SD) and ‘Hearts and Minds’ (HM) counter-terrorist strategy. We argue that these military metaphors offer creative inspiration to help academics and practitioners theorise CP in richer, more reflective, and more balanced and complementary ways. An appreciation of both metaphors is likely to favour the use of hybrid strategies comprising SD and HM elements, which may provide the best HRM solutions to CP for the same reasons as the military now considers parallel hybrid solutions optimal for combating terrorist and guerrilla insurgency.

Keywords HRM strategy, corporate psychopathy, metaphor, Machiavellianism, narcissism, the dark triad.

Introduction

Corporate psychopathy (CP) has been discussed by Boddy (2011a) as the psycho-cultural root of the recent global financial crisis and as today threatening capitalism’s survival. Marshall et al. (2013) discuss it as arising from the activities of rogue individuals and as a broader organisational-cultural phenomenon requiring cultural regulation. The present paper considers CP under these same rogue individual and organisation-cultural aspects – but this time from the very different standpoint of Human Resource Management (HRM) strategy and with practical HRM solutions in mind.

In view of Boddy’s (2005, p.30) description of corporate psychopaths as “willing to lie and able to present a charming facade in order to gain managerial promotion via a ruthlessly opportunistic and manipulative approach to career advancement”, it is reasonable to expect at least awareness and vigilance from experienced HRM professionals. Proactive, strategic solutions have however not been forthcoming. Sometimes HRM has even been complicit in adding to the problem. Boddy (2012) describes a newspaper article by Basham (2011) suggesting at least one global investment bank may recently have used psychometric tests to recruit psychopaths.

We argue that strategic HRM solutions to CP must be placed on corporate agendas. To guide their design, we offer a metaphorical language which we think can inspire HRM professionals to give thorough and balanced attention to what we call the ‘general problem’ of CP. Our articulation of the general problem in behavioural terms leads us to emphasise that its many corporate manifestations can have situational, psychological or cultural drivers which all require attention.

HRM is presently motivated to win places in boardrooms and at top management tables by linking its activities to improved corporate performance (Boxall and Purcell 2008; Kaufman 2010). It seeks this through lateral alignment with knowledge management strategy (Haesli and Boxall 2005) and vertical alignments with corporate governance practice (Konzelmann et al. 2006; Martin and Gollan 2012) and overall business strategy (Boxall and Purcell 2008). Missions to tackle CP are currently absent from these HRM strategy agendas. HRM’s traditional recruitment, training, reward and promotion roles permit only very limited and isolated actions against CP.

There is an obvious and important opportunity for HRM professions to improve their corporate performance by developing strategies towards eliminating CP. The plain need to combat CP can give ambitious HRM professionals strong arguments for increasing their status and influence within conceivably any large organisation. Specifically, the profession can argue that if given adequate boardroom sanction and support to scrutinise and performance appraise management at the highest levels, and if permitted to harness its traditional resources to steer or redesign organisational culture – including the cultural ‘tone at the top’ - then HRM strategies so empowered may finally be able to reduce CP at all organisational levels. The metaphorical understandings we propose bring into sharp focus, and with considerable mnemonic power, a range of otherwise far-from-obvious matters which we think corporate HRM strategists will need to consider.

Our sequence methodology runs as follows. The next section introduces our ‘search and destroy’ (SD) and ‘hearts’ and minds’ (HM) military metaphors. It also observes that strategic imagination is commonly reliant on metaphor and that ours have particular advantages which make them unlike most other military metaphors. After that we explain the ‘general problem’ of imprudence, corruption and concealment which we think CP presents. This simplifying behavioural definition leads us to argue that CP can only be addressed by considering the various situational, psychological and cultural drivers that typically interact to produce it. We then discuss practical ‘SD inspired’ and ‘HM inspired’ corporate HRM solutions. We conclude that taken together, both types of solution can deliver the broad response the general problem requires. Hybrid SD-HM solutions are likely to be most effective in corporate life, just as they are now preferred by the military.

Strategy Metaphors

‘Search and Destroy’ is a military strategy based on the premise that enemy terrorist or guerrilla forces can be hunted down by small and highly mobile military units capable of sifting through local civilian populations to find them. The strategy is famously associated with its use by US Air Cavalry in the Vietnam War, where it proved ineffective by underestimating the enemy’s ability to remain hidden, to replenish its ranks, and to derive support from local populations (Grinter 1975). ‘Hearts and Minds’ is a term famously coined by US President Lyndon B. Johnson, which was first used to describe a very different strategic approach followed by the British Military in the Malayan Emergency of 1948-1960. Fundamentally it attempted to undermine local support for the military arm of the Malayan Communist Party by providing Malays and indigenous tribes with food and medical supplies (Stubbs 2004).

There is a small but growing literature showing how corporate strategies can learn metaphorically from military strategies (Ojiako et al. 2010; Marshall et al. 2012; Ojiako et al. 2012). When military metaphors are used within management contexts this obviously carries the risk that individuals or groups will be socially reconstructed as ‘enemies’. This invites corporate scapegoating based on naive assumptions of voluntarism and methodological individualism (see Wilson 1993). A related ethical consideration is Giacalone and Promislo’s (2013) argument that management academics and professionals should look critically on all “potensiphonic” language that perpetuates norms of domination, power and control within organisational settings. We certainly do not wish to see HRM language adopt such characteristics. However, our ‘learning from the military’ rationale is that taken in their mutual complementarity, SD and HM metaphors encapsulate the military wisdom which says enemies often cannot be defeated by targeted military aggression alone. Conflict is complex and solutions must be multi-faceted. Hunting down concentrations of enemy individuals or groups may sometimes be necessary – but it is rarely sufficient. Sometimes it does not succeed because the enemy is too well concealed. Sometimes it is counter-productive because it creates martyrs and stimulates popular resentment - which makes enemies stronger. By stark contrast, the academic CP literature we discuss in this paper remains quite uncritical of its own preoccupation with what we will call the ‘search and destroy’ approach to tackling CP. Ironically, then, it is to the military we turn for metaphors that can encourage a more balanced and less exclusively hostile approach.

We need metaphor to make sense of our everyday lives (Lakoff and Johnson 1983). The managerial value of metaphor for strategy conception in particular has been widely debated (Cacciaguidi-Fahy and Cunningham 2007; Elle 2012). Use of metaphor to produce descriptive management science constructs has had strong advocates (e.g. Morgan 1980) and critics (e.g. Pinder and Bourgeois 1982) over the years. Morgan (1980, p.605) says we risk being ‘imprisoned within metaphor’ if we make no provision for switching between multiple metaphors. Our essay heeds this advice by offering contrasting metaphors which we hope will alert academics and practitioners alike to the importance of switching reflectively between different ways of seeing when addressing the problem of CP. Our use of sensationalising metaphor is intended, in tandem with Morgan’s advocacy of multiple metaphors, as a safeguard against entrapment within metaphor. We contend that the more outrageous and provocative the metaphor (note that ours provokes through irony), the more mindful we then become that our metaphors can usefully guide, but should not substitute for, our efforts to articulate concrete problems and solutions in non-metaphorical terms.

Corporate Psychopathy: the general problem

The concept of CP integrates the term ‘psychopath’ from psychology with the term ‘corporate’ from organisational literature. Corporate psychopaths can be defined as individuals who ruthlessly manipulate others, within corporate settings, in order to promulgate their own importance and objectives at the expense of others and without conscience (Boddy 2005; Babiak and Hare 2007; Boddy 2011). They have also been named as Executive, Industrial and Organisational Psychopaths, and Organisational Sociopaths by others (Pech and Slade 2007). Such individuals are narcissistic and malicious leaders who callously disregard others’ needs or wants and are prepared to go to any lengths including unethical practices in order to gain attention and their own ends, often to the detriment of colleagues and employees (Perkel 2005).

So what problems arise when these socially aversive tendencies establish themselves in leadership roles within corporations? Several authors have highlighted reduced productivity and increased workplace absenteeism. (Clarke 2005). Hogan and Hogan (2001) highlight leadership derailment. Baughman et al. (2012) mention corporate bullying. Ray and Jones (2011) mention willingness to engage in illegal environmental pollution. Clearly, however, to add to this list of harms we would soon need to consider very specific corporate contexts. A CEO, a derivatives designer and a rogue trader may all act under the influence of CP with very different opportunities and powers to cause very different problems for their corporations. We therefore need to find common threads. Our solution is to propose the existence of an abstract ‘general problem’ which CP is always likely to present, no matter what concrete-specific form it takes. We present this general problem as a tendency for conceptually distinct problems of ‘imprudence’, ‘corruption’ and ‘concealment’ to synergise to produce socially aversive outcomes. Our thinking is that armed with this simple stencil, HRM professionals will be better placed to detect CP in its many guises.

We define the problem of imprudence as referring to the corporate psychopath’s excessive and myopic risk-taking (see Marshall et al. 2013). We define the problem of corruption as referring to corporate psychopath’s preoccupation with self-aggrandisement, which they indulge through malfeasance in the absence of a strong moral compass to regulate behaviour (see Levenson et al. 1995). We define the problem of concealment as a second order problem referring to the corporate psychopath’s heightened capacity to conceal those risky and often very short-sighted personal agendas which undermine the long term interests of the corporations they work for (Schouten and Silver 2012). Corporate psychopaths are adept at concealment because: (i) they often possess exceptional leader charisma which they use to build misplaced trust (Babiak et al. 2010), (ii) they tend to discourage interaction amongst the subordinates they gather around them (Langbert 2010), (iii) they possess dramaturgical skills which can adapt spontaneously to meet the emotional needs of their audiences (Cleckley 1941; Gardner and Avolio 1998) and (iv) their emotional coolness makes them adept manipulators in interpersonal situations (Williams and Paulhus 2004).

However, the corporate psychopath’s capacity for concealment also has a crucial weakness. Their general tendency to combine sycophancy towards superiors with bullying and blame-shifting towards subordinates has been widely acknowledged (e.g. Morse 2004). A study by Boddy (2011b) suggests that when psychopaths have supervisory roles and engage in bullying behaviour, employees will tend to regard them as unfair and disinterested in their feelings. Hence the best way to locate them may often be to listen carefully for such views from the suspect manager’s subordinates.

Knowing what this ‘general problem’ comprises, we can then ask the equally general and abstract question of why it arises. Bakan (2004) argues that the problem stems from corporate law. Legal imperatives to increase shareholder and not stakeholder value lead corporations to mirror the unethical and rapacious pursuit of self-interest found in individual psychopaths. Bakan’s thesis became well known for its airing in the (2003) documentary ‘The Corporation’. In one of the documentary’s sections (entitled ‘The Pathology of Commerce’) the Canadian forensic psychologist Robert Hare suggests various further analogies between corporations and individual psychopaths. Hare observes that both tend to have superficial, manipulative and predatory relations with others. Both possess powerful and grandiose senses of self and lack empathy and remorse. They are reluctant to acknowledge responsibility for their behaviours. They are impulsive in the absence of external controls. Furthermore, both are often preoccupied with short term as opposed to long term goals.

Although these suggested behavioural similarities are tantalising we need to treat them with caution. A deterministic standpoint which views all corporations subject to shareholder value imperatives as psychopathic would be absurd. Many corporations around the globe have endeavoured to demonstrate qualities such as care, customer focus, long-termism and prudence. Yet Hare’s comparison in ‘The Corporation’ seems to allow for this. Through equivocal use of language, he merely proposes loose tendencies for degrees of likeness or similarity between corporations and psychopathic individuals to be valid sometimes, and to a thought-provoking extent. In other words, each point of comparison offers a theoretical frame for capturing a particular manifestation of CP. - Hence, although the Bakan-Hare thesis has been subject to much criticism, for example with the argument that “it is the aggregated decisions of ordinary people - especially stockholders – that determine management’s freedom to conduct corporate business responsibly” (Lee 2005, p.89), it may nonetheless work well as a simple analytical device to help us better appreciate CP’s various manifestations.

One of the more obvious advantages of the ‘The Corporation’s guiding metaphor is that it reflects prevalent situational pressures upon corporate employees in the modern world. Consider in particular the growing problem of time pressure across modern society, which some research (e.g. Konrath et al. 2010) says has driven down levels of dispositional empathy in recent decades. An implication for the corporate world is that intensifying time pressure can often have a brutalising effect by leading managers to allocate insufficient time for empathic interaction with others. This is supported by research viewing short-term orientation as a symptom of moral dissolution within firms (Nevins et al. 2007) and linking perceptions of time pressure to psychological malaise produced by corporate downsizing (Probst 2003). Such pressures might easily lead many managers to appear as if they possess the psychopath’s hallmark lack of empathy, even though they do not possess the subclinical condition.