How Psychopaths Become CEO’s (Pt 4) – Preferred Cultures

Previously, the situations and trends psychopaths prefer. Now, we will discuss the cultures as summarized in the introductory post of this mini-series:

• Personalities and cultures that desire, respect and promote authority, rules, discipline and processes
• Low tolerance for negativity, dissent and conflict
• Highly competitive, incentivized and self-interested
• Bottom-line orientation, outcomes justify processes

What’s difficult to remember is that psychopaths can be personable, especially smart ones. They can have rather high emotional intelligence since it’s about understanding, not feeling. They can also be very charismatic since it’s learnable, as is emotional intelligence. However, since relating emotionally to people is a conscious, mental exercise for them, it’s more taxing for them than for a sincere, sensitive person. Therefore, they must find other means of influencing such as through rules and uniformity.

Thus, cultures and people who prefer respecting authority to questioning authority and who prefer processes and rules to education and relationship building are better for psychopaths. They also prefer positive, agreeable, and compliant people, proverbial “yes men” who are more focused on not rocking the boat than doing what’s best. Psychopaths prefer self-interested people who are highly motivated by competition and incentives. This allows them to isolate people and prevent strong relational bonds from building, thus “dividing and conquering.”

Since uniformity is less taxing than diversity not only form a relational perspective but also a managing and leading one, psychopaths will thrive in homogeneous business cultures, especially from a personality perspective. Thus, rules, processes, negativity and dissent become psychopaths’ tools to eradicate personalities that do not conform to the one that they want.

In short, psychopaths prefer control-oriented, bottom-line focused cultures. This permits a business-accepted “ends justify means” approach for exploiting and disposing of those who threaten them or no longer serve their purposes.