Successful Psychopaths: Are They Unethical Decision-Makers and Why?

Abstract

Ethical business scenarios, Moral disengagement, Subclinical psychopathy, Successful psychopaths, Unethical decision-making,

Initial development of an implicit and explicit approach to assess psychopathy

“…Moral reasoning was also associating across all measurements of psychopathy, with decreased reasoning ability associated with increased levels of total psychopathy (ACL and PCL-SV) and for both Factor 1 and Factor 2. This again supported evidence for moral reasoning as a core component of psychopathy (Glenn et al, 2009;O'Kane, Fawcett & Blackburn, 1996;Young et al, 2012) but not conventional moral reasoning (Stevens et al, 2012).…”

“…conventional reasoning) that appeared to relate (e.g. Stevens et al, 2012) but the specific element relating to reasoning ability. It is certainly possible that the conventional reasoning element is more open to socially desirable responding due to potential transparency, whereas the reasoning element (i.e.…”

“…impulsive responding (Blair et al, 2005) and 4.) moral reasoning/moral cognition difficulties which include inferior moral reasoning (Glenn et al, 2009;O'Kane, Fawcett & Blackburn, 1996;Young et al, 2012), being unable to distinguish between moral and conventional reasoning, making less reference to the victim's welfare when judging moral situations (Blair, 1995;Blair et al, 1995), and a tendency to make unethical judgements (Stevens et al, 2012).…”

Psychopathic traits of business and psychology students and their relationship to academic success

“…Some (Boddy, 2005;Stevens, Deuling & Armenakis, 2012) go on to suggest that psychopathy may even be adaptive in certain environments; when ‗success' is contingent upon distancing oneself from competitors emotionally. One such environment may be the business sector, in which empathising with rival companies may hamper one's ultimate goal of dominating the market, which often involves bankrupting opponents (Ouimet, 2010).…”

Of Predators and Preys: Corporate Psychopathy and Employee Burnout as Parallels

“…The term corporate psychopath is an amalgamation of psychopathy from the field of psychology and corporate from the business world, to signify an individual with sub-clinical psychopathic traits or anti-social behaviour, who functions within the corporate context (Boddy, 2005;Stevens et al, 2012). Corporate psychopaths refer to dysfunctional personalities who exist undetected in society and work within organizations (Smith et al, 2014).…”