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The Palgrave Handbook of Workplace Well-Being pp 1–28Cite as

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Employee Well-Being Under Corporate Psychopath Leaders

Abstract

This chapter reports on 21 in-depth interviews in the UK and USA with corporate employees who were currently working or had previously worked with a toxic leader in the form of a corporate psychopath. This is thus a chapter that is concerned with the impact on well-being of working with a corporate psychopath. Corporate psychopathy was defined using a measure of psychopathy involving prototypical characteristics such as lying, cheating, egocentricity, emotional unresponsiveness, and grandiosity. A contribution of the chapter is that it answers the call for research which links the destructive leadership literature with employee well-being. Research participants in both countries reported that their well-being was affected by psychopathic leadership, with reports of stress-related illnesses and depression, including suicidal thoughts. The chapter concludes that corporate psychopaths, in both the UK and USA, appear to have a similar protocol for achieving their objectives and achieve similar results. This protocol involves using loud, regular, public bullying combined with threats of violence to create a fearful, cowed, and compliant workforce who can the more easily be manipulated and controlled by the abusive corporate psychopath. Research participants in both the USA and UK suffered from severely reduced well-being because of this common experience.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Business School, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia

    Clive R. Boddy

  2. Access Global Partners, New York, NY, USA

    Ellis Malovany

  3. Middlesex University, London, UK

    Aylin Kunter

  4. Capella University, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Gregory Gull

Authors
  1. Clive R. Boddy
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  2. Ellis Malovany
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  3. Aylin Kunter
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  4. Gregory Gull
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Correspondence to Clive R. Boddy .

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  1. Woodbury University, North Hills, CA, USA

    Satinder Dhiman

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Boddy, C.R., Malovany, E., Kunter, A., Gull, G. (2020). Employee Well-Being Under Corporate Psychopath Leaders. In: Dhiman, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Workplace Well-Being. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02470-3_74-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02470-3_74-1

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