Cambridge Festival: Speaker Spotlight

Clive Boddy is a research methodologist and also a pioneer in the field of corporate psychopathy where he has been researching the effects of toxic, psychopathic managers on business, organisations and society since 2005.

He will be speaking at the Cambridge Festival in an event which will explore the depths of Corporate Psychopathy and how far some individuals might go to gain a bonus. The event is available to attend online and in-person.

How has your research on corporate psychopaths evolved since your 2011 paper, The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis? Have you encountered new patterns or developments that challenge your earlier findings?

Since that paper was published in 2011, I and various colleagues have conducted at least another 12 studies into corporate psychopaths and what they do within organisations. These have included qualitative research studies into psychopathic leadership and how this results in manifestations of extreme managerial behaviour including bullying, fraud, greed, recklessness, abuse, and even death threats being made to a person who dared oppose the fraudulent activities of a corporate psychopath. 

I've also undertaken historical studies of some of the heroes of 20th-Century capitalism who have been identified as having held psychopathic traits and behaved in a psychopathic manner, including Albert Dunlap, Robert Maxwell, the three top guys at Enron (Fastow, Lay and Skilling) and of course Bernie Madoff. Common behaviours identified include bullying, manipulation, untruthfulness and, of course, fraud in all four of these historical case studies.

Albert Dunlap for example, was admired by the financial press as a cost-cutting corporate turnaround specialist (known as "Chainsaw Al Dunlap") but was described by contemporaries as having no ethics, morals, or loyalty and as being manipulative, ruthless and destructive.

I have also undertaken, mainly with another collaborator, (Professor Ross Taplin of Curtin University, Australia) six quantitative studies using samples of white-collar workers in the UK, Australia and the United States.  Some of the findings from this have not been published yet.

However, we can see that a craving for material goods, power and money uniquely drives the psychopathic. The psychopathic equate money with power and control over other people and so don't merely seek it for its own sake but for its ability to help them manipulate and control others.

None of my research nor that of other people who research into this area, has in any way challenged the view that corporate psychopaths are attracted to industry sectors which can offer them money, power and control. Indeed, other researchers have found higher average levels of psychopathy in workers in the financial services sector in Wall Street and a student of mine also found higher average levels of psychopathy in the financial sector in London. 

At one stage Bloomberg, the financial services website, reported on the theory that corporate psychopaths were involved in the last global financial crisis (GFC), and an analysis of the hundreds of comments made below the discussion, indicated that these financial commentators agreed with my theory that corporate psychopaths were involved in the GFC, in the ratio of approximately 6 to 1.

A few of them said that the theory, far from being the groundbreaking and radical theory that academics estimated it to be, was merely a statement of what they had already known and what was obvious to anyone who worked within corporate banking and financial services. To these financial commentators, the theory was merely stating the obvious. 

Recent research also finds that corporate psychopaths use politicking within organisations to achieve their ends. They engage in political behaviour and networking with superiors to create a good impression and build a falsely positive narrative concerning their claimed successes and other people's apparent failures. Patterns from the new research findings all corroborate and support, rather than challenge, earlier findings and theories. Corporate psychopaths are just as political, manipulative, greedy, selfish, untruthful, careless of others and indifferent to the consequences of their actions as psychopathy researchers theorised they would be. 

In your upcoming talk, you will explore whether corporate psychopaths are willing to engage in risky financial practices (like derivatives) to earn bonuses, even at the expense of global financial stability. What do you think are the key psychological traits that drive this willingness?

This psychopathic willingness to harm other people for money is all driven by personal greed coupled with a couldn't-care-less attitude towards others.  Psychopaths have no conscience nor care for other people and are motivated by entirely egotistical and selfish motivations. Therefore, causing economic, financial or environmental damage to other people or to global sustainability does not concern them in the slightest.

As purely rational, non-emotional actors they will always seek to maximise their own utility, in other words, they want to maximise the benefits they accrue to themselves, in preference to any social or external costs this may incur on other people. In colloquial terms, they'd happily "sell their own mother for a shilling". So basically, they are driven by greed, unfettered by any moral compass, compassion for others or concern for the welfare of future generations. 

You mentioned that at least one corporate bank used a psychopathy measure for recruitment before the 2008 financial crisis. Is this practice still in place today, and what do you believe the long-term consequences are for banks that prioritise psychopathy in their hiring processes?

I do not know whether the practice of recruiting psychopathic employees is still in place, hopefully not, and I have only come across one other case of a company deliberately using a psychopathy measure to recruit people and that was a media company in Australia. In my view, among the long-term consequences for organisations which have managers and leaders embodying high degrees of psychopathy would be moral bankruptcy, and I think any morally bankrupt organisation is inevitably bound to become financially bankrupt.

In the meantime, academic and other studies of corporate banks and the finance sector consistently find a lack of morals and ethics together with lies, deceit, fraud and falsifications. The final report of the Australian Royal Commission into misconduct in the banking, superannuation and financial services industry, is a good example of this, being a depressing catalogue of greed, a lack of ethics and widespread immorality in corporate banking.

Given the significant risks posed by corporate psychopaths in finance, how do you propose that organisations can screen out individuals with high levels of psychopathy without creating biases or inadvertently harming diversity in hiring?

Organisations can screen for psychopaths by choosing caring employees or by testing for psychopathic traits and behaviour in job applicants.  As far as we know primary psychopaths, those who hold the underlying traits of psychopathy, are not overly congregated in any particular ethnic or national group apart from the fact that males tend to be slightly more psychopathic than females. Therefore, efforts to keep psychopaths out of senior leadership positions should not inadvertently harm simultaneous efforts towards diversity.

On the other hand, not screening them out may harm diversity, because we find that under their leadership there are higher levels of gender discrimination. This gender discrimination issue is discussed in my paper "Finding psychopaths in white-collar jobs: A review of the evidence and why it matters", available from scholarly search engines.

Some observers have drawn parallels between Donald Trump’s leadership style and traits often associated with corporate psychopaths, such as a focus on personal gain and a disregard for broader societal impact. In your view, how might such leadership influence national economies, particularly in terms of risk-taking behaviours and economic stability?

There is a huge and growing academic literature on the dark, narcissistic personality of Donald Trump and I have no plans to contribute to that literature as everything that needs to be said or written has already been said or written. However, in my view, voters ignore this literature at their peril. 

I have written about politicians who remind me of Trump such as Hermann Goering, the leader of the Luftwaffe and Hitler's 2nd in command for most of the Second World War. The paper called, "Populism and political personality: What can we learn from the dark triad personality of Hermann Goering?" illustrates that many so-called 'strongman leaders' eventually leave their countries in ruins as they enter into armed attempts to take over foreign countries and expand their territories against the wishes of those already living in those territories. This expansionist behaviour galvanises both internal and external opposition and creates strong and sometimes unexpected alliances, including between those diverse nations who seek to protect themselves in mutual defence agreements. If, under Trump, the USA increasingly becomes a rogue nation, then European states will start to re-examine their 'special relationships' with it. 

When the upper echelon of a group's or country's leadership are all psychopathic, as they were in Nazi Germany from 1933 onwards, then there is no one to act as the conscience of the organisation or nation and decisions become increasingly extreme and morally unhinged in their nature and consequences. 'Groupthink without conscience' you could call it. Inappropriate and extreme decisions may sound sensible to other psychopaths but will inevitably lead to long-term misallocations of resources and eventually destructive ruin, including war, famine and internal civil unrest. 

Given the increasing awareness of toxic leadership in corporate settings, do you think public and institutional attitudes toward corporate psychopaths are changing? Are organisations more likely to take action to limit their influence today than they were a decade ago?

Public attitudes towards corporate psychopaths are certainly changing because 20 years ago the idea of the corporate psychopath was not well accepted. Whereas today people seem to immediately know what a corporate psychopath is, who toxic leaders are, and how abusive and bullying their behaviour can be expected to be. The idea of the corporation as a trustworthy body led by trustworthy leaders has long evaporated.   

Organisations seem to lag behind this awareness and if you look at the literature on whistle-blowing and how HR fail to deal with bullying in the workplace, it becomes obvious that organisations do not know how to or do not want to react to this reputational and existential threat. A recent paper written with Louise Boulter, called "HRM’s Response to Workplace Bullying: Complacent, Complicit and Compounding" discusses this, and the findings are encapsulated in the title; HR are unconcerned with bullied employees and tend to make the situation worse from the victim's point of view. In our research, for example, no one had a good word to say about how organisations and HR deal with bullied employees. 

Nonetheless, this psychopathic leadership behaviour does pose an existential threat to organisations because the cumulative effects include the exit behaviour of the organisation's most knowledgeable and qualified staff as they seek to remove themselves from the toxic environment created by their abusive, psychopathic leaders. Recruits then enter an environment marked by a lack of clear direction and communication from the psychopathic leaders, by a lack of experienced managers from whom to learn and by a climate of fear in which everyone is afraid to speak out against the poor, ineffective and organisationally inappropriate decisions of the psychopathic leaders. Organisational decline results from this.

Published: 3 March 2025

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