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Anyone who has ever worked in a large corporation has seen the empty
suits that seem to inexplicably rise to positions of power. They talk a
great game, possessing extraordinary verbal acuity, and often with an amazing
ability to rise quickly without significant accomplishments to positions of
great personal power, and often using it ruthlessly once it is achieved.
Their ruthless obsession with power and its visible rewards rises above the
general level of narcissism and sycophancy that often plagues large
organizations, especially those with an established franchise where
performance is not as much of an issue as collecting their rents.
And anyone who has been on the inside of the national political process knows
this is certainly nothing exclusive to the corporate world.
Here is a paper recently published in the
Journal of Business Ethics that
hypothesizes along these lines. It is only a preliminary paper, lacking in
full scholarship and a cycle of peer review.
But it raises a very important subject. Organizational theories such as the efficient
markets hypothesis that assume rational behaviour
on the part of market participants tends to fall apart in the presence of the
irrational and selfish short term focus of a significant minority of people
who seek power, much less the top one percent of the psychologically ruthless.
Indeed, not only was previously unheard of behaviour
allowed, it became quite fashionable and desired in certain sections of
American management where ruthless pursuit of profits at any cost was highly
prized and rewarded. And if caught, well, only the little people must pay for
their transgressions. The glass ceiling becomes a floor above which the
ordinary rules do not apply.
If you wish to determine the character of a generation or a people, look to
their heroes, leaders, and role models.
This is nothing new, but a lesson from history that has been unlearned. The
entire system of checks and balances, of rule of law, of transparency in
government, of accountability and personal honor, is based on the premise
that one cannot always count on people to be naturally good and
self-effacing. And further, that at times it seems that a relatively small
group of corrupt people can rise to power, and harm the very fabric of a
society.
‘When bad men combine, the good must
associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied
sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.’
Edmund Burke
History has proven
that.'
Lord Acton
These things tend to go in cycles. It will be interesting to see how this
line of analysis progresses. I am sure we all have a few candidates we would
like to submit for testing. No one is perfect or even perfectly average. But
systems that assume as much are more dangerous than standing armies, since
like finds like, and dishonesty and fraud can become epidemic in an
organization and a corporate culture, finally undermining the very law and
principle of stewardship itself.
'Our government...teaches the whole people by its
example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for
law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself;
it invites anarchy.'
Louis D. Brandeis
MF Global, and the reaction to it thus far, is one
of the better examples of shocking behaviour that
lately seems to be tolerated, ignored, and all too often met with weak
excuses and lame promises to do better next time, while continuing on as
before.
"These
corporate collapses have gathered pace in recent years, especially in the
western world, and have culminated in the Global Financial Crisis that we are
now in.
In watching these events unfold it often appears that the senior directors
involved walk away with a clean conscience and huge amounts of money.
Further, they seem to be unaffected by the corporate collapses they have
created. They present themselves as glibly unbothered by the chaos around
them, unconcerned about those who have lost their jobs, savings, and
investments, and as lacking any regrets about what they have done.
They cheerfully lie about their involvement in events are very persuasive in
blaming others for what has happened and have no doubts about their own
continued worth and value. They are happy to walk away from the economic
disaster that they have managed to bring about, with huge payoffs and with
new roles advising governments how to prevent such economic disasters.
Many of these people display several of the characteristics of psychopaths
and some of them are undoubtedly true psychopaths. Psychopaths are the 1% of
people who have no conscience or empathy and who do not care for anyone other
than themselves.
Some psychopaths are violent and end up in jail, others forge careers in
corporations. The latter group who forge successful corporate careers is
called Corporate Psychopaths...
Psychologists have argued that Corporate Psychopaths within organizations may
be singled out for rapid promotion because of their polish, charm, and cool
decisiveness. Expert commentators on the rise of Corporate Psychopaths within
modern corporations have also hypothesized that they are more likely to be
found at the top of current organisations than at
the bottom.
Further, that if this is the case, then this phenomenon will have dire
consequences for the organisations concerned and
for the societies in which those organisations are
based. Since this prediction of dire consequences was made the Global
Financial Crisis has come about.
Research by Babiak and Hare in the USA, Board and Fritzon in the UK and in Australia has shown that
psychopaths are indeed to be found at greater levels of incidence at senior
levels of organisations than they are at junior
levels (Boddy et al., 2010a). There is also some
evidence that they may tend to join some types of organisations
rather than others and that, for example, large financial organisations
may be attractive to them because of the potential rewards on offer in these
organizations."
Clive R. Boddy, The Corporate Psychopaths Theory
of the Global Financial Crisis, Journal of Business Ethics, 2011
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