What Are the Effects of Psychopathic Traits in a Supervisor on Employees' Psychological Distress?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Psychopathy, a construct with roots in forensic psychology, has recently been applied to the corporate context (Babiak, & Hare, 2006; Babiak, 2007). The goal of this study is to determine whether there is a relationship between supervisor's score on a measure of psychopathy and employees' psychological distress. One hundred and sixteen employees from a branch of a large Canadian financial institution have scored their supervisor on a psychopathy measure (B-Scan-360 psychopathy subscale; Babiak, & Hare, in press) and have completed a self-measure of psychological distress (General Health questionnaire-12; Goldberg & Williams, 1991). Results from regression analyses indicate that supervisor psychopathy and predicts employees' psychological distress. The present results highlight the importance of screening for problematic personalities such as psychopathy for selection and promotion. INTRODUCTION Increasingly, organizations are becoming more and more concerned about the epidemic state of mental health problems in the workplace. The World Health Organization has stated that depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide (World Health Organization, 2000). They also predict that, by the year 2020, depression will reach second place in the global burden of disease ranking. This means tremendous costs both for the individuals and for working organizations internationally. Prevention of the problem is difficult since researchers are still at the early stage of understanding the factors underlying psychological distress in the workplace. The identification of which factors cause an employee to experience psychological distress will certainly involve personal (stress management, personality, family) and organizational variables (workload, working hours). One factor, managerial behaviour, has yet to be studied extensively, but the few studies that have examined this element are unanimous: Poor management behaviour can lead to psychological distress in employees. Hogan & Hogan (2001) report that one of the reasons for studying managerial incompetence is that bad managers make life miserable for those who must work for them, and there is virtually nothing subordinates can do to defend themselves, except to suffer in silence. Organizations often search for employees who are charismatic, confident, have the ability to make difficult decisions, and the capacity to present an ostentatious vision of the future (Babiak, Neumann & Hare, 2010). Although, at face value, these abilities may correspond well with attractive traits assumed to be required by managers and leaders of organizations, these abilities are also descriptive of problematic personality features (Babiak, & Hare, 2006). Arguably the most dangerous of these problematic workplace personalities is psychopathy (Hare, 1999), a construct with roots in forensic psychology that has recently been applied to the corporate context (Babiak, 2007). Psychopathic employees can have a negative effect on other employees, as well on the organization itself, making it important to have an assessment instrument that will assist in employee selection and promotion (Babiak & Hare, 2006). Babiak and Hare (in Press) have built a 360 measure of corporate behavior that includes a subscale measuring psychopathic traits. Objectives The objective of this paper is to present results of the relations between scores on the BScan Supervisor (Babiak, & Hare, in Press) and self-ratings of employee psychological distress (General Health questionnaire- 12; Goldberg & Williams, 1991). To our knowledge, this is the first study to measure the impact of psychopathic traits in supervisors on employees' psychological distress. METHOD After the purpose and voluntary confidential nature of the project had been described (i.e., to measure the impact of different types of personalities on workplace behavior / mental health), 136 employees and managers of large financial institution in Quebec were invited to complete a number of self-report questionnaires regarding personality and an array of industrialorganizational variables. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".