Seeing as our current goal is the Partnership for the Goals I wanted to explore partnership within the workforce and more specifically what it takes for someone to be a businessman/owner. There was a study a few months or years ago that suggested that business men were in fact psychopaths. I did some deep research into the issue to see and to tell you whether this was true.
To be more clear businessmen aren’t necessarily psychopaths they just share the same/similar traits as them. Which means that those in successful corporations tend to assert dominance over others, act impulsively, and lack empathy. An article by Medical News Today shows that some studies that have looked into this relationship between psychopathy and success have had less firm conclusions and there has been no consensus of the scientific opinion. Therefore, scientists from The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, AL, and Iowa State University in Ames, IA, have decided to re analyse these results and reach a final clearer conclusion.
Maybe you can think of some reasons why a businessman should be a psychopath, it might make their job easier?!
Some characteristics of a psychopath include being self centered and less empathetic. Which may help a businessman reach their business goals like promotions as they are focused on themselves and less wary of others around them that wanted the same goal/position. Psychopaths also crave validation and have high levels of self entitlement. Which in a businessmen could be reflected in their hard work paying off therefore they receive reinforcement by their successful business deals.
The researchers of this study were particularly interested in understanding “the association between psychopathic personality characteristics and leadership emergence, leadership effectiveness, and transformational leadership.” which in simple terms means whether psychopathic traits helped an individual become a leader and whether these traits then made them a successful one. They re-analyzed data from 92 existing datasets and from this existing they found some weak correlations. However, they were able to conclude that people with psychopathic tendencies were more likely to emerge as leaders, but that people with these traits were slightly less likely to be effective leaders.
However they were able to find out some interesting things about the different sexes. In men the psychopathic traits help men appear effective while in women these characteristics are more negative in their appearance. The researchers wrote that “...women displaying psychopathic behaviors are viewed as violating not only general gender norms […], but also those associated with female leaders.”. This double standard is really unfair towards women as to achieve a position of power they are often told that they should mimic the behavior of successful male leaders. But of course as shown by this study this backfires completely.
So there you have it a brief summary into the issue of psychopaths within the workplace which from this study we can see it is in fact a myth. However, like most studies it has its limitations. In this case some of them included a small sample of data, success rated by subjective measures and there isn't a standard way of measuring psychopathy.
I now ask you to think why this behavior is tolerated in the workplace and whether you think that the world/ society might be better if it wasn’t? How would this narcissistic and selfish mindset affect our society? Would we be more caring of others? Would jobs be more open to other members of the public?
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