The Workplace Psychopaths: Can an Organization Address their Empathy Deficit
A Literature Review by Fran S-RdD, MS Biology
Empathy is a critical skill for everyone, most especially for leaders, in the workplace. It enables leaders to connect with their people well resulting in having a deeper understanding of the specific motivations their people have. It also makes everyone in the workplace work together in harmony and provide a better customer experience for their customers. Now, how about the corporate psychopaths who lack empathy? Can empathy be learned?
Who are Corporate Psychopaths?
“Corporate psychopaths crave power and dominant positions but they are also chameleons, able to disguise their ruthlessness and antisocial behavior under the veneer of charm and eloquence”, says Jack McCullough (Author & Founder of CFO Leadership Council, a global organization), in his article The Psychotic CEO . He also cited the observations of Karen Landay who co-authored a research report on psychopathy and leadership. Linday said “Clinical psychopathy is a personality disorder and that is something that is diagnosed by a medical doctor. That is not what we are talking about when we are looking at psychopathic leaders. We are just talking about people who have crappy personalities, who share some of the personality traits of psychopaths, including boldness, meanness, and impulsivity. Lack of empathy is a hallmark trait. They are typically very charming on the surface, they are bold and not afraid. They don’t care that they are hurting you. They will do what they have to do. “
The study , “Corporate Psychopathy: Talking the Walk” by Dr. Paul Babiak et. al. with 203 participants who are corporate professionals, indicated that psychopathy was positively associated with charisma/presentation style (creativity, good strategic thinking, and communication skills) but negatively associated with ratings of responsibility/performance (being a team player, management skills, and overall accomplishments). Copyright ? 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Empathy & Effective Leadership
Daniel Goleman’s idea, published in 1995, posits that emotional intelligence is extremely important in leadership and is revolutionary. Emotional Intelligence is defined as the ability to understand and manage your emotions, as well as recognize and influence the emotions of those around you.
If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.?
Compassion is What Moves Us To Take Action!
The human species can empathize. We are born with it.? An international team led by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine has shown that the anterior insular cortex, a specific area of the brain, is the only activity center of empathy.
Justin Bariso , author of the “EQ Applied” shared that empathy can be categorized into three types, following through from Daniel Goleman’s and fellow Psychologist Paul Ekman’s concept of empathy:
Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand how a person feels and what they might be thinking. Cognitive empathy makes us better communicators because it helps us relay information in a way that best reaches the other person.?
Emotional empathy (also known as affective empathy) is the ability to share the feelings of another person. Some have described it as “your pain in my heart.” This type of empathy helps you build emotional connections with others.?
Compassionate empathy (also known as an empathic concern) goes beyond simply understanding others and sharing their feelings: it moves us to take action, to help however we can.?
James Fallon, a Neuroscientist and the author of ?The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain shared that psychopaths have a very high level of cognitive empathy. He said that “they are very good at reading other people and seem like they can read minds sometimes. This is probably why they are highly manipulative. But even though they can understand people’s emotions, it doesn’t register emotionally with them—they have no emotional empathy. They understand people feel pain, but they use that information to use that other person. They could look like they are ideal leaders because they show unemotional decisiveness. They have low emotional reactivity and are incapable of feeling any form of anxiety.”
The Empathy Deficit of Psychopathic Leadership
The lack of empathy can be caused by various factors like the results of genetics, experiences from the environment, disease, psychological trauma personality, developmental disorder, or prohibited drugs.
In 1938 , the German Temmler pharmaceutical company began advertising the sale of their new flagship product – Pervitin (early Methamphetamine). Described as the ultimate pick-me-up, the drug quickly became a sensation with people praising its performance-enhancing abilities. In every which way the drug provided people with a ‘neuronal firework’. It dulled feelings of empathy, hunger, and thirst and reduced sensitivity to pain. It was the perfect weapon for turning soldiers into ultimate fighting machines.
According to Clive R. Boddy who presented a case study on Psychopathic Leadership from the Journal of Business Ethics, "psychopaths are those people representing about 1 % of the population who demonstrate a predatory approach to life which can be an effect of dysfunction in the amygdala, a part of the brain that regulates emotion.? Corporate psychopaths are simply those psychopaths in the workplace who are highly career-oriented but ruthless and can be exploitative employees. They exist at about 3.5 % at senior organizational levels based on this study."
In the research article by C. Boddy, he also cited that organizational research finds that 60–75 % of all employees typically reported that the worst aspect of their job was their immediate supervisor who caused their mental stress. Furthermore, 75% of the employees who participated in the research said that mental stressors are the main cause of absenteeism.
Can We Teach Compassionate Empathy to Corporate Psychopaths?
In a study by Harma Meffert et. al., they compared the brain activity of 18 psychopathic offenders while viewing video clips of emotional hand interactions and while experiencing similar interactions. Brain regions involved in experiencing these interactions were not spontaneously activated while viewing the video clips. However, this group difference was markedly reduced when we specifically instructed participants to feel with the actors in the videos (Harma Meffert et. al, 2013). They found that when psychopaths are asked to empathise they were able to do so.
The Mirror Neurons
The mirror neurons in our brain enable us to mimic or follow a task that we observe someone do. Mirror neurons (discovered by Neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues in 1991) fire up to specific actions performed by self and matching actions performed by others. According to their research, mirror neurons form the biological basis of compassion and thereby of affective empathic experience. We can awaken the mirror neurons by observing how compassionate leaders coach and also constantly seek feedback from mentors with empathy skills.
Corporate Outreach Activities
Increasing participation of leaders doing outreach activities as part of the organization’s Corporate Social Responsibility can bring awareness to the various situations that the world is facing. During these events, the processing of key learning and observations must be covered to ensure that insights are shared that will influence people to be more aware of their feelings and reactions. We must ask questions and give specific instructions that redirect their attention to critical observations during the outreach that will help awaken their mirror neurons.
Fear & Lack of Awareness
The lack of awareness by not paying attention or getting interested in knowing about the experiences of our people inhibits us from helping and showing compassion. Go out of our offices and walk to where our teams are. Ask how they are doing. Spare time to have a little chat. Get interested in their activities or know what they enjoy doing. Discover what challenges them and motivates them to come to work.
Our fear of being vulnerable has paralyzed us to demonstrate compassionate empathy. We have become stoic, and stone-faced, believing that this is the ideal image of a leader. The fear of flaunting our weaknesses paralyzed our somatic or body cells to feel the emotions of our people. The best leaders aren't afraid to be vulnerable.
Joan Halifax has beautifully described in her TedTalk what compassion and true empathy means.
“And when I worked in the prison system, it was clear to me: this and that many of us in this room and in most all of the men that I worked with on death row, the seeds of their own compassion had never been watered. Compassion is inherent in human quality. It is there in every human being. But the conditions but the conditions of compassion to be activited or to be aroused are particular conditions. I had that condition to a certain intent from my own childhood illness… What is fascinating is that compassion has enemies, like pity, moral outrage, fear. We have a society or a world that is paralyzed by fear. And in that paralysis, of course, that our capacity for compassion is also paralyzed.”
It is important to self-reflect and confront our limiting beliefs. Now, if we feel the need to seek a professional to help us process our belief system, and the circumstances that shaped them, then we should go for it.
The Effect of Sympathy vs. Empathy to Happiness Level
In the Parking Ticket Experiment , the happiness level increased by an average of 6.9% after talking with someone who expressed emotional empathy over their situation- receiving a parking ticket. On the other hand, it was also evident in the experiment that those whom the host sympathized with, after knowing that they received a parking ticket, had about a 6.71% drop in their happiness level.
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Nature vs. Nurture
Early abuse could induce psychopathy, says Neuroscientist James Fallon in an interview with Jill Suttie for her article, “Can a Psychopath Learn to Feel Your Pain “. He highlighted in the interview that we should be very diligent about how we treat our kids.
Suttie described Dr. Fallon’s discovery while studying the brains of psychopaths. Later he discovered that one of the brain scan samples he had indicated a psychopathic pattern, which he later discovered to be his. However, he attributed it to his parents’ care that made him not become a full-blown psychopath. This inspired Dr. Fallon to remember his past behavior and challenge his assumptions about the role of nature versus nurture in shaping psychopathy. The outcome was a book, The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain , published in 2013. He speculates on the potential healing effects of a loving upbringing.
The Empirical Evidence
We are being reminded that Science has given us enough empirical evidence that we can address the empathy deficit and that even corporate psychopaths are coachable and trainable. We just need our compassionate leaders/coaches/trainers/executives to lead this change. We need to bring more awareness and tackle the fear that they feel limits their capacity to show compassion.
Self-Care
We must start to foster a culture of compassionate empathy in the workplace but it should start from having compassionate empathy for ourselves. There's a big possibility of empathy burnout for leaders, coaches, and those for whom empathy is much expected. If we need to vent with a trusted friend at work or outside work, then we must do so. If we need to take short breaks or breathers then by all means we need to spare time. We cannot give what we don't have.
Whilst we strictly implement coming in on time and ensuring that they show up at work, we should also have the same conviction in encouraging them to follow their break schedules, go home on time, and plan their vacation leaves. It is good that most companies invest in ensuring coaches and trainers have the emotional intelligence level that truly carries out a compassionate approach to coaching and skill transfer. We can also invest in having counseling sessions accessible to employees so they can discuss their fears and limiting beliefs. This will truly go a long way.
This article is also published on my blogsite: Livewell.Fraoel.com
References/Literatures Reviewed:
Jack McCullough, The Psychotic CEO December 2019 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-psychopathic-ceo/?sh=33e210aa791e
Paul Babiak, Ph.D. et. al., Corporate Psychopathy: Talking the Walk, April 2010 https://doi.org/10.1002/bsl.925
Leonard F. Hausser, Empathy & Mirror Neurons. A View of Contemporary Neuropsychological Empathy Research, 2012 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22957393/#:~:text=The%20discovery%20of%20mirror%20neurons,of%20the%20other%20persons%20feeling .
Mount Sinai Health System, Researchers Identify Area of the Brain That Processes Empathy, October 2012 https://www.newswise.com/articles/researchers-identify-area-of-the-brain-that-processes-empathy
Jill Suttie, Can a Psychopath Learn to Feel Your Pain? February, 2014
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/can_a_psychopath_learn_feel_pain#:~:text=A%20psychopath%20can%20have%20a,they%20have%20no%20emotional%20empathy .
Melissa Hegenboom, Psychopathic Criminals Have Empathy Switch, July 2013 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-23431793
Boddy, C.R. Psychopathic Leadership A Case Study of a Corporate Psychopath CEO. J Bus Ethics 145, 141–156 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2908-6
Lauren Landry, Why Emotional Intelligence is Important in Leadership https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/emotional-intelligence-in-leadership
Oleg Nekrassovski, Psychopathy and Leadership, August 2016 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309385425_Psychopathy_and_Leadership
The Drug that Fuelled the Nazi Blitzkrieg https://www.history.co.uk/article/the-drug-that-fuelled-the-nazi-blitzkrieg
The Genius of Empathy by Judith Orloff, MD. - The 20-Question Self-Assessment on Empathy https://drjudithorloff.com/quizzes/are-you-an-empath-20-question-self-assessment-test/
Somatic Cells, February 2024 https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Somatic-Cells
The Amazing World of Psychiatry: A Review of the Psychopath Inside by James Fallon, April 2017 https://theamazingworldofpsychiatry.wordpress.com/2013/12/02/a-review-of-the-psychopath-inside-by-james-fallon/
Lea Winerman, The Mind's Mirror, 2005 https://www.apa.org/monitor/oct05/mirror#:~:text=Neuroscientist%20Giacomo%20Rizzolatti%2C%20MD%2C%20who,and%20feel%20empathy%20for%20them .
Harma Meffert, Valeria Gazzola, Johan A. den Boer, Arnold A. J. Bartels, Christian Keysers, Reduced spontaneous but relatively normal deliberate vicarious representations in psychopathy, Brain, Volume 136, Issue 8, August 2013, Pages 2550–2562, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awt190