Corporate Psychopathy: can ‘search and destroy’ and ‘hearts and

minds’ military metaphors inspire HRM solutions?

Abstract Corporate psychopathy (CP) thrives as perhaps the most significant

threat to ethical corporate behaviour around the world. We argue that Human

Resources Management (HRM) professionals should formulate strategic

solutions metaphorically by balancing what strategic military planners famously

call ‘Search and Destroy’ (SD) and ‘Hearts and Minds’ (HM) counter-terrorist

strategy. We argue that these military metaphors offer creative inspiration to help

academics and practitioners theorise CP in richer, more reflective, and more

balanced and complementary ways. An appreciation of both metaphors is likely

to favour the use of hybrid strategies comprising SD and HM elements, which

may provide the best HRM solutions to CP for the same reasons as the military

now considers parallel hybrid solutions optimal for combating terrorist and

guerrilla insurgency.

Keywords HRM strategy, corporate psychopathy, metaphor, Machiavellianism,

narcissism, the dark triad.

Introduction

Corporate psychopathy (CP) has been discussed by Boddy (2011a) as the psycho-

cultural root of the recent global financial crisis and as today threatening capitalism’s

survival. Marshall et al. (2013) discuss it as arising from the activities of rogue

individuals and as a broader organisational-cultural phenomenon requiring cultural

regulation. The present paper considers CP under these same rogue individual and

organisation-cultural aspects – but this time from the very different standpoint of

Human Resource Management (HRM) strategy and with practical HRM solutions in

mind.

In view of Boddy’s (2005, p.30) description of corporate psychopaths as “willing

to lie and able to present a charming facade in order to gain managerial promotion via a

ruthlessly opportunistic and manipulative approach to career advancement”, it is

reasonable to expect at least awareness and vigilance from experienced HRM

professionals. Proactive, strategic solutions have however not been forthcoming.

Sometimes HRM has even been complicit in adding to the problem. Boddy (2012)

describes a newspaper article by Basham (2011) suggesting at least one global

investment bank may recently have used psychometric tests to recruit psychopaths.

We argue that strategic HRM solutions to CP must be placed on corporate agendas.

To guide their design, we offer a metaphorical language which we think can inspire

HRM professionals to give thorough and balanced attention to what we call the ‘general

problem’ of CP. Our articulation of the general problem in behavioural terms leads us to

emphasise that its many corporate manifestations can have situational, psychological or

cultural drivers which all require attention.

HRM is presently motivated to win places in boardrooms and at top management

tables by linking its activities to improved corporate performance (Boxall and Purcell

2008; Kaufman 2010). It seeks this through lateral alignment with knowledge

management strategy (Haesli and Boxall 2005) and vertical alignments with corporate

governance practice (Konzelmann et al. 2006; Martin and Gollan 2012) and overall

business strategy (Boxall and Purcell 2008). Missions to tackle CP are currently absent

from these HRM strategy agendas. HRM’s traditional recruitment, training, reward and

promotion roles permit only very limited and isolated actions against CP.

There is an obvious and important opportunity for HRM professions to improve

their corporate performance by developing strategies towards eliminating CP. The plain

need to combat CP can give ambitious HRM professionals strong arguments for

increasing their status and influence within conceivably any large organisation.

Specifically, the profession can argue that if given adequate boardroom sanction and

support to scrutinise and performance appraise management at the highest levels, and if

permitted to harness its traditional resources to steer or redesign organisational culture –

including the cultural ‘tone at the top’ - then HRM strategies so empowered may finally

be able to reduce CP at all organisational levels. The metaphorical understandings we

propose bring into sharp focus, and with considerable mnemonic power, a range of

otherwise far-from-obvious matters which we think corporate HRM strategists will need

to consider.

Our sequence methodology runs as follows. The next section introduces our ‘search

and destroy’ (SD) and ‘hearts’ and minds’ (HM) military metaphors. It also observes

that strategic imagination is commonly reliant on metaphor and that ours have particular

advantages which make them unlike most other military metaphors. After that we

explain the ‘general problem’ of imprudence, corruption and concealment which we

think CP presents. This simplifying behavioural definition leads us to argue that CP can

only be addressed by considering the various situational, psychological and cultural

drivers that typically interact to produce it. We then discuss practical ‘SD inspired’ and

‘HM inspired’ corporate HRM solutions. We conclude that taken together, both types of

solution can deliver the broad response the general problem requires. Hybrid SD-HM

solutions are likely to be most effective in corporate life, just as they are now preferred

by the military.

Strategy Metaphors

‘Search and Destroy’ is a military strategy based on the premise that enemy terrorist or

guerrilla forces can be hunted down by small and highly mobile military units capable

of sifting through local civilian populations to find them. The strategy is famously

associated with its use by US Air Cavalry in the Vietnam War, where it proved

ineffective by underestimating the enemy’s ability to remain hidden, to replenish its

ranks, and to derive support from local populations (Grinter 1975). ‘Hearts and Minds’

is a term famously coined by US President Lyndon B. Johnson, which was first used to

describe a very different strategic approach followed by the British Military in the

Malayan Emergency of 1948-1960. Fundamentally it attempted to undermine local

support for the military arm of the Malayan Communist Party by providing Malays and

indigenous tribes with food and medical supplies (Stubbs 2004).

There is a small but growing literature showing how corporate strategies can learn

metaphorically from military strategies (Ojiako et al. 2010; Marshall et al. 2012; Ojiako

et al. 2012). When military metaphors are used within management contexts this

obviously carries the risk that individuals or groups will be socially reconstructed as

‘enemies’. This invites corporate scapegoating based on naive assumptions of

voluntarism and methodological individualism (see Wilson 1993). A related ethical

consideration is Giacalone and Promislo’s (2013) argument that management academics

and professionals should look critically on all “potensiphonic” language that perpetuates

norms of domination, power and control within organisational settings. We certainly do

not wish to see HRM language adopt such characteristics. However, our ‘learning from

the military’ rationale is that taken in their mutual complementarity, SD and HM

metaphors encapsulate the military wisdom which says enemies often cannot be

defeated by targeted military aggression alone. Conflict is complex and solutions must

be multi-faceted. Hunting down concentrations of enemy individuals or groups may

sometimes be necessary – but it is rarely sufficient. Sometimes it does not succeed

because the enemy is too well concealed. Sometimes it is counter-productive because it

creates martyrs and stimulates popular resentment - which makes enemies stronger. By

stark contrast, the academic CP literature we discuss in this paper remains quite

uncritical of its own preoccupation with what we will call the ‘search and destroy’

approach to tackling CP. Ironically, then, it is to the military we turn for metaphors that

can encourage a more balanced and less exclusively hostile approach.

We need metaphor to make sense of our everyday lives (Lakoff and Johnson 1983).

The managerial value of metaphor for strategy conception in particular has been widely

debated (Cacciaguidi-Fahy and Cunningham 2007; Elle 2012). Use of metaphor to

produce descriptive management science constructs has had strong advocates (e.g.

Morgan 1980) and critics (e.g. Pinder and Bourgeois 1982) over the years. Morgan

(1980, p.605) says we risk being ‘imprisoned within metaphor’ if we make no provision

for switching between multiple metaphors. Our essay heeds this advice by offering

contrasting metaphors which we hope will alert academics and practitioners alike to the

importance of switching reflectively between different ways of seeing when addressing

the problem of CP. Our use of sensationalising metaphor is intended, in tandem with

Morgan’s advocacy of multiple metaphors, as a safeguard against entrapment within

metaphor. We contend that the more outrageous and provocative the metaphor (note that

ours provokes through irony), the more mindful we then become that our metaphors can

usefully guide, but should not substitute for, our efforts to articulate concrete problems

and solutions in non-metaphorical terms.

Corporate Psychopathy: the general problem

The concept of CP integrates the term ‘psychopath’ from psychology with the term

‘corporate’ from organisational literature. Corporate psychopaths can be defined as

individuals who ruthlessly manipulate others, within corporate settings, in order to

promulgate their own importance and objectives at the expense of others and without

conscience (Boddy 2005; Babiak and Hare 2007; Boddy 2011). They have also been

named as Executive, Industrial and Organisational Psychopaths, and Organisational

Sociopaths by others (Pech and Slade 2007). Such individuals are narcissistic and

malicious leaders who callously disregard others’ needs or wants and are prepared to go

to any lengths including unethical practices in order to gain attention and their own

ends, often to the detriment of colleagues and employees (Perkel 2005).

So what problems arise when these socially aversive tendencies establish

themselves in leadership roles within corporations? Several authors have highlighted

reduced productivity and increased workplace absenteeism. (Clarke 2005). Hogan and

Hogan (2001) highlight leadership derailment. Baughman et al. (2012) mention

corporate bullying. Ray and Jones (2011) mention willingness to engage in illegal

environmental pollution. Clearly, however, to add to this list of harms we would soon

need to consider very specific corporate contexts. A CEO, a derivatives designer and a

rogue trader may all act under the influence of CP with very different opportunities and

powers to cause very different problems for their corporations. We therefore need to

find common threads. Our solution is to propose the existence of an abstract ‘general

problem’ which CP is always likely to present, no matter what concrete-specific form it

takes. We present this general problem as a tendency for conceptually distinct problems

of ‘imprudence’, ‘corruption’ and ‘concealment’ to synergise to produce socially

aversive outcomes. Our thinking is that armed with this simple stencil, HRM

professionals will be better placed to detect CP in its many guises.

We define the problem of imprudence as referring to the corporate psychopath’s

excessive and myopic risk-taking (see Marshall et al. 2013). We define the problem of

corruption as referring to corporate psychopath’s preoccupation with self-

aggrandisement, which they indulge through malfeasance in the absence of a strong

moral compass to regulate behaviour (see Levenson et al. 1995). We define the problem

of concealment as a second order problem referring to the corporate psychopath’s

heightened capacity to conceal those risky and often very short-sighted personal

agendas which undermine the long term interests of the corporations they work for

(Schouten and Silver 2012). Corporate psychopaths are adept at concealment because:

(i) they often possess exceptional leader charisma which they use to build misplaced

trust (Babiak et al. 2010), (ii) they tend to discourage interaction amongst the

subordinates they gather around them (Langbert 2010), (iii) they possess dramaturgical

skills which can adapt spontaneously to meet the emotional needs of their audiences

(Cleckley 1941; Gardner and Avolio 1998) and (iv) their emotional coolness makes

them adept manipulators in interpersonal situations (Williams and Paulhus 2004).

However, the corporate psychopath’s capacity for concealment also has a crucial

weakness. Their general tendency to combine sycophancy towards superiors with

bullying and blame-shifting towards subordinates has been widely acknowledged (e.g.

Morse 2004). A study by Boddy (2011b) suggests that when psychopaths have

supervisory roles and engage in bullying behaviour, employees will tend to regard them

as unfair and disinterested in their feelings. Hence the best way to locate them may

often be to listen carefully for such views from the suspect manager’s subordinates.

Knowing what this ‘general problem’ comprises, we can then ask the equally

general and abstract question of why it arises. Bakan (2004) argues that the problem

stems from corporate law. Legal imperatives to increase shareholder and not stakeholder

value lead corporations to mirror the unethical and rapacious pursuit of self-interest

found in individual psychopaths. Bakan’s thesis became well known for its airing in the

(2003) documentary ‘The Corporation’. In one of the documentary’s sections (entitled

‘The Pathology of Commerce’) the Canadian forensic psychologist Robert Hare

suggests various further analogies between corporations and individual psychopaths.

Hare observes that both tend to have superficial, manipulative and predatory relations

with others. Both possess powerful and grandiose senses of self and lack empathy and

remorse. They are reluctant to acknowledge responsibility for their behaviours. They are

impulsive in the absence of external controls. Furthermore, both are often preoccupied

with short term as opposed to long term goals.

Although these suggested behavioural similarities are tantalising we need to treat

them with caution. A deterministic standpoint which views all corporations subject to

shareholder value imperatives as psychopathic would be absurd. Many corporations

around the globe have endeavoured to demonstrate qualities such as care, customer

focus, long-termism and prudence. Yet Hare’s comparison in ‘The Corporation’ seems to

allow for this. Through equivocal use of language, he merely proposes loose tendencies

for degrees of likeness or similarity between corporations and psychopathic individuals

to be valid sometimes, and to a thought-provoking extent. In other words, each point of

comparison offers a theoretical frame for capturing a particular manifestation of CP. -

Hence, although the Bakan-Hare thesis has been subject to much criticism, for example

with the argument that “it is the aggregated decisions of ordinary people - especially

stockholders – that determine management’s freedom to conduct corporate business

responsibly” (Lee 2005, p.89), it may nonetheless work well as a simple analytical

device to help us better appreciate CP’s various manifestations.

One of the more obvious advantages of the ‘The Corporation’s guiding metaphor is

that it reflects prevalent situational pressures upon corporate employees in the modern

world. Consider in particular the growing problem of time pressure across modern

society, which some research (e.g. Konrath et al. 2010) says has driven down levels of

dispositional empathy in recent decades. An implication for the corporate world is that

intensifying time pressure can often have a brutalising effect by leading managers to

allocate insufficient time for empathic interaction with others. This is supported by

research viewing short-term orientation as a symptom of moral dissolution within firms

(Nevins et al. 2007) and linking perceptions of time pressure to psychological malaise

produced by corporate downsizing (Probst 2003). Such pressures might easily lead

many managers to appear as if they possess the psychopath’s hallmark lack of empathy,

even though they do not possess the subclinical condition.

Our paper’s concern with CP is therefore fundamentally a concern with behavioural

constellations comprising imprudence, corruption and concealment that we think are

likely to crystallise from multiple interacting situational and psychological drivers

found commonly across a range of very different corporate settings. Sometimes

situational pressures may exacerbate psychopathic or narcissistic patterns within

individual personalities by activating previously suppressed traits. Resulting behaviours

may then influence organisational subcultures through normalisation. Changed

perceptions of what constitutes acceptable and perhaps even admirable corporate

practice might then influence the professional socialisation of new employees. Taking

stock, HRM strategies cannot tackle the general problem of imprudence, corruption and

concealment by focussing narrowly on subsets of its various interacting drivers. The

military metaphors we propose below are intended to facilitate the broad ‘joined-up’

response the problem requires.

Learning from the Military: search and destroy

This section explores key issues which we think SD inspired corporate HRM solutions

to CP need to address. Military SD strategy is named after its two stage procedure of

searching for and then destroying the enemy (Hills 2002). Corporate HRM design

inspired by SD strategy would parallel this by comprising strategies that engage (firstly)

with procedural issues of how to ‘search for’ corporate psychopaths, and (secondly)

with issues that arise in relation to how such individuals, once identified, can justifiably

be removed from or prohibited from taking on inappropriate corporate roles. CP

literatures are at present only starting to engage with these practical problems (Langbert

2010; Boddy et al. 2010; Wellons 2012). Underlying the removal problem is a loyalty

problem. Corporate psychopaths are adept at making others admire and trust them – in

some cases almost unconditionally. These loyalty problems are easily exacerbated by

increased social bonding amidst organisational crisis. Studies of recent corporate

scandals suggest that even after perpetrating major corporate scandals, the CEOs of

firms such as Worldcom, Enron and Arthur Anderson have striven, with some success,

to remain untouchable by fostering cultures of dissonance which divert blame (e.g.

Benson and Campbell 2007; Benson and Hogan 2008).

Consequently there arises the need for SD-inspired corporate HRM strategies to

align with governance arrangements if they are to tackle CP at the highest corporate

levels. Only powers to scrutinise and remove managers that are held by major investors,

and which boards also require to meet their fiduciary obligations, can render SD-

inspired corporate HRM strategy effective in providing both ex ante and ex post

solutions to major corporate scandals whose origins lie in the rogue activities of senior

executives. Although we comment on several weaknesses of SD and strengths of HM as

models of developing corporate HRM strategy, we should be clear that in many cases

where corporate scandals trace back to the works of specific powerful individuals within

corporations, we believe that searching and destroying may be the only viable option,

and alternative strategies of winning over would-be perpetrators’ hearts and minds may

be highly ineffective.

Consider, for example, that rogue corporate executives who preside over scandal

may share striking psychological similarities with political dictators who perceive

themselves as powerful and untouchable. Do we believe there would have been any

chance at all of winning over the hearts and minds of leaders such as Stalin, Saddam

Hussein, Pol Pot, Mussolini etc.? Indeed, Gandhi’s now famous letter to Hitler just

before the outbreak of World War II beseeching him to avoid the savagery of war now

seems heartbreakingly naive. This problem is certainly one of ‘hubris’. In managerial

literature this term is often taken simply as a synonym for optimism in corporate deal-

making (Roll 1986). Yet in the politics literature, hubris is viewed as an “acquired

personality disorder” (Owen and Davidson 2009) which, because it is caused by the

experience of power itself, concentrates in high office in particular (Russell 2011).

Applying this problem to the higher echelons of corporate elites, the problem of hubris

intensifies yet again when we set it within the context of the narcissistic power lust (e.g.

Sandowsky 1995) and its underlying fear of power wielded by others (e.g. Lee et al.

2012) that are prominent in CP. We might say that the case for all organisations to

develop some SD-inspired corporate HRM strategy to tackle CP rests ultimately on the

premise that in more severe cases, the hubris of the narcissistic psychopath can only be

fought and defeated, not tamed through reason or ethical plea.

Much of the literature on corporate psychopathy (e.g. Boddy 2005; Babiak and Hare

2007; Babiak et al. 2010, Boddy 2011) supports this viewpoint by contending that

corporate psychopaths are not amenable to ethical plea because they are biogenetically

damaged so as to be incapable of empathy. Ronson (2011) argues these hard-wired

psychological patterns are common in prison cells, psychiatric wards and boardrooms,

in each case discernible by the same callous lack of empathy. The hopelessness of

transforming ‘hearts and minds’ through ethical growth is typically stressed for

psychopaths within all three domains. Today’s psychopathic prisoners are often viewed

as tomorrow’s recidivists (Hemphill et al. 1998). Psychopathic hospital patients often

encounter therapeutic pessimism (Salekin 2002). Unsurprisingly, then, corporate

psychopaths are typically viewed as ‘bad apples’ who will ‘rot the whole barrel’ if not

thrown out (Furnham & Taylor 2011, p.4, 110).

In corporations, SD counter-terrorist strategies translate straightforwardly into the

use of psychometric instruments such as the ‘B-Scan 360’ (see Mathieu et al. 2013)

which has been designed specifically to screen for corporate psychopaths. One issue

surrounding the use of this and similar instruments designed to tap subclinical

psychopathy (e.g. the (2006) Hare and Neumann Psychopathy Checklist) is that their

validities and reliabilities remain contestable due to professional scepticism concerning

the classification of psychopathic personality disorders and the efficacy of all related

diagnostic systems (Tyrer 2004). Another issue is the likely inadequacy of any single

diagnostic system or isolated diagnostic episode. Freud’s classic (1910) paper dedicated

to warning against ‘wild psychoanalysis’ remains valued as a technical contribution to

the clinical literature which urges against all premature diagnosis made without detailed

understanding of individual patients built up over time. In terms of SD military

metaphor, then, corporate HRM strategy that relies on diagnostic instruments to search

for CP might easily mistake friend for foe and burn down the wrong village. Moreover,

just as can occur in response to military SD strategy, the hunted foes might get smart by

anticipating the search procedures, hiding their weapons more effectively and then

misdirecting the searchers. In other words, unless the face validities of the individual

items within the diagnostic tools are extremely low, and unless respondents are

otherwise wholly unaware of why they are being tested, corporate psychopaths might

simply work out what socially aversive attributes the tools are designed to tap. This

would allow them to conceal these attributes and tailor their responses to promote their

image maintenance agendas – and of course we have already highlighted ‘concealment’

as a skill they possess in abundance (Schouten and Silver, 2012).

As yet there appears to be no academic literature asking the obvious question of

how successful these arch-manipulators might be in evading capture in naturalistic

settings where such diagnostic tools are used in earnest. This detection issue requires

much more serious attention in CP literature. The need for ongoing monitoring of

suspect individuals, and to draw on multiple sources of evidence, including the views of

several colleagues when taking HR decisions about them, has been recognised by

Langbert (2010). He emphasises that ‘anonymous tip lines’ and ‘open door policies’ can

create useful information flows. It can also be helpful to consult co-workers in various

other departments to ascertain whether suspected employees may be spinning webs of

deception across their organisations. He also suggests that ‘teamwork and integrity’

should always be considered within employee performance appraisals. The rationale for

all of these suggestions is that psychopaths are often charming to equals and superiors

who are close to them, but bullying to subordinates and callous to those further from

them. Looking to subordinates and to co-workers in other departments who have not

fallen under the spell of the psychopath’s charisma can therefore yield particularly

valuable evidence for performance appraisal.

These suggestions for detecting psychopaths are not far removed from some current

corporate HRM practice. ‘360-degree feedback’ for senior executives, informed by

multiple organisational perspectives, derive from their use within the German Military

during WWII (Fleenor and Prince 1997) and have been used since the 1950s by

companies such as ESSO (now part of Exxon Mobil) (Vukotich 2010). Subsequently

their use has spawned academic debate (e.g. Kaplan and Paulus 1994) over whether it is

fair to use them for reward and promotion purposes, and over the anonymity issues they

raise. According to Treviño and Nelson (2010) the ‘American Express’ global financial

services firm gives its 360-degree performance appraisal system strong ethical

credentials by basing its ratings very explicitly on corporate values and codes of

conduct. If employees do not perform well on ratings of the extent to which they treat

others with respect, actively listen to others, act with integrity, reliability and

consistency, and display honesty, then they are unlikely to be favoured in promotion

and compensation decisions. To ensure that such performance appraisals are useful for

mitigating corporate psychopathy, all that remains to be added is that they genuinely

aspire to take a 360-degree view of the employee by considering all the sources of

evidence that Langbert (2010) considers important – and that they can give convincing

assurances that protect the anonymity of subordinates brave enough to make critical

comments about their bosses.

We should however qualify these suggestions by adding that any SD approach to

dealing with CP should learn from Freud’s classic warning against wild diagnosis.

Arguably, the best role for measures like the B-Scan 360 may be as initial screens which

very tentatively flag up possible cases of subclinical psychopathy. On-going 360-degree

performance appraisal of the employees concerned – including those undertaken for the

most senior corporate managers - might then take great care to give balanced and fair

consideration to the issue of whether CP ought to be used (even loosely) as a theoretical

prism to help explain and evaluate performance. Of course we also suggest that

‘imprudence’, ‘corruption’ and ‘concealment’ should be used as organising categories

for all investigations.

SD-inspired HRM strategies however may be susceptible to making a dangerous

assumption about the nature of the problem; that is, they may conceive of it too

agentically, through mental simplifications which reduce it down to the perceived

malign intentions and powers of the small numbers of individuals to be ‘searched for’

and ‘destroyed’. Hence the structural causes of CP which theorists like Bakan (2004)

attune us to, may be neglected altogether. Such simplifications facilitate prejudice. A

classic social psychological criticism of SD military strategy, which arose from the trial

that followed the Mai Lai massacre that occurred in South Vietnam in 1968, was that it

amounts to sanctioned violence. Kelman (1973) argued that the terms ‘search’ and

‘destroy’ can easily lead the agents of SD strategy to dehumanise the sanctioned target

groups. The thought process which Second Lieutenant William Calley seemed to follow

at Mai Lai illustrates this powerfully. Prior to his 1971 war crimes conviction, Calley

explained in a personal statement that he had considered captured men, women and

children as ‘the enemy’ who he had been ordered to ‘destroy’. Mai Lai further raised

issues of how the use of descriptive categories such as ‘enemy’, ‘Viet Cong’ and

‘communist’ can dehumanise socially sanctioned target groups and facilitate violence

against them by producing what Bandura (1999) has famously called ‘moral

disengagement’. Arguably that lesson from Mai Lai applies not just to warfare but to the

common usage of such terms as ‘bad apples’ to describe corporate psychopaths.

When corporate ‘bad apples’ (Sutton 2010) are plucked out before they rot the

barrel, or similarly when military units take strong actions against those found to be

sheltering enemy combatants or munitions, such measures can be staged to set highly

visible deterrent examples for others. Yet these deterrent signals may prove

counterproductive where martyrs are made of popular high profile corporate leaders and

terrorist leaders alike. SD strategists in both walks of life also risk finding that their

freshly ‘decapitated’ adversaries prove capable of quickly replacing lost leaders.

Arguably, SD strategists may downplay or wholly neglect these issues of martyrdom

and futility where they have mentally reduced the threats they are up against to the

personal powers of targeted individuals.

Learning from the Military: hearts and minds

We might conceive of HM as allowing corporate HRM strategists to overcome these

problems. What makes HM fundamentally different from SD in military life is its

refusal to localise the threat it confronts to small numbers of rogue individuals (Capstick

2007; Cragin 2007). Instead it seeks to win over the hearts and minds of potentially

hostile populations living in conflict zones, both by respecting and engaging with them,

and by helping to meet their everyday needs. Just as military strategists might

sometimes assume that significant potential for armed resistance to a military

occupation always remains latent right across an occupied territory, corporate HRM

strategy might view CP as always present at some ‘level’ within the personality of every

corporate employee and every corporate culture. Hence forms of ethical ‘support’ - for

example guidance on how to manage commonly occurring ethical conflicts – become

important if employees are to be prevented from going over to ‘the other side’.

Arguments for thinking along these lines can be found in Marshall et al.’s (2013)

analysis of corporate psychopathy which argues that we focus on small numbers of

biogenetically damaged ‘primary psychopaths’ at our peril. We should instead be more

concerned about rising levels of Machiavellianism, narcissism and ‘secondary’

psychopathy both within organisational cultures and across modern societies more

generally. Marshall et al. observed that quite unlike primary psychopaths, these much

broader psychological constituencies comprise individuals who can feel guilt and can

therefore be supported in their ethical conflicts.

Military hearts and minds campaigns do not just prevent enemies from gaining

strength. They also view local populations as intelligence-gathering and labour

resources to be accessed. Correspondingly, HRM professionals might regard individual

employees who display some low level psychopathic patterns as human capital to be

utilised optimally, both in the fight against CP and for improving corporate performance

more generally. Harnessing such employees in the fight against CP might involve

reasoning with them that it is in their interests to distance themselves from pockets of

psychopathic activity by providing what evidence they can. They might be reminded

that they have duties of candour – or they may be offered incentives for coming

forward. Harnessing the skills of such individuals to improve corporate performance

more generally can involve actively rewarding their ‘adaptive’ traits – notably charisma,

dramaturgical skill, and flexibility in fast-moving corporate environments – while

discouraging their socially aversive ones.

The HM approach makes it possible, to some extent at least, to sidestep the

diagnostic problems which inevitably arise with SD-inspired corporate HRM strategy.

But what can winning hearts and minds actually mean in practical terms within a

corporate context? Provisions of positive role models, of ethics training for corporate

managers, of various forms of reward and recognition for ethical conduct, and of

properly policed ethics codes, are all important ingredients of ethical leadership (Brown

and Mitchell 2010) that offer HRM professionals mechanisms for tackling CP.

Redesigning performance management systems to link reward less to short-term

outcomes such as sales growth, and more to evidence of ethically-adjusted behaviour,

seems very worthwhile too. This could of course integrate with 360-degree appraisal.

One perhaps highly effective although less obvious HRM intervention may involve

varying the role descriptions of a broader range of corporate managers to ensure more

face-to-face contact with those corporate stakeholders who are most vulnerable to, and

concerned about, the possibility that unethical corporate conduct may be inflicted upon

them. The thinking here is simply that interpersonal contact stimulates empathy and

helps build patterns of reciprocal altruism and mutual obligation that cannot develop

where managers remain hidden behind the corporate veil (Lewicki et al. 2006).

Another literature with important implications for ethical decision-making argues

that ethics training programmes aimed at building dispositional empathy may be less

effective than small ethical reminders built into specific decision-making processes.

Making employees aware of obligations to follow ethics codes immediately prior to

making decisions can be surprisingly effective by making ethics ‘salient when needed’

(Shu et al. 2012). In view of Marshall et al.’s (2013) emphasis on the problem of

‘imprudence’ whereby corporate psychopaths fail to take the long and large view of

things (i.e. by failing to think long term, and by failing to consider the needs and

interests of stakeholders over both shorter and longer terms), it seems important to

stress that a hallmark of the HM approach to dealing with CP should perhaps be the

design of decision-making interventions that ensure such matters are considered very

explicitly, either immediately prior to informal decisions or within formal decision-

making processes. This can amount very straightforwardly to ensuring that ethical

issues (e.g. risks to various stakeholders) are given their own sections within committee

agenda items calling for decisions.

Conclusion

Modern military strategy argues for hybrid combinations of SD and HM when

confronting enemy forces that blend by degrees into civilian populations (Hills 2002).

Excess reliance upon SD can result, as the US military found in Vietnam, in the naive

assumption that the enemy has been beaten militarily, when in fact it is constantly

replenishing from civilian populations (Grinter 1975). Excess reliance on HM, on the

other hand, can result in failure to launch decisive attacks on enemy centres of gravity –

as contemporary critics of the US military’s HM strategy in Afghanistan contend (Wood

2011). Hybrid approaches, Hills argues, are preferable because they surgically target

concentrations of enemy forces while striving not to alienate and militarise the broad

populations from which these forces emerge. When such logic is applied to

corporations, it generates the idea that it might make sense to employ SD very

selectively and sparingly within corporations, where severe imbalances exist between

the risks posed by individual managers and the strengths they can contribute. If such

interventions are reserved for high profile corporate leaders, then these may not only

neutralise significant pockets of psychopathic activity within corporations but may also

promulgate powerful signals concerning how behavioural prescriptions and

proscriptions are changing.

Our SD and HM metaphors are intended to steer HRM strategists intent on

combatting CP to ask these questions: are performance appraisals that use psychometric

instruments and/or other sources of evidence to ‘diagnose’ CP demonstrably fair and

reliable? Are there pockets of CP which can be ‘targeted’ for offensive actions? Will

there be much resistance? Are prominent corporate psychopaths enmeshed within

cultural constituencies comprising like-minded individuals upon whom they rely for

support? Will their colleagues, and in particular their subordinates, ever come forward

in sufficient numbers to alert corporations to their activities? Will the numbers of such

individuals willing to testify against the excesses of corporate psychopaths increase or

diminish when investigations or sackings commence? Might such activities produce

dysfunctional organisational climates and migrations of corporate talent? Might they

also attract hostile media attention and bring reputational damage? Our SD and HM

metaphors remind us that tackling CP is a very dangerous game. Just like warfare, it

unleashes what Shakespeare in Julius Caesar called the ‘dogs of war’ – a reference to

the many unintended consequences that can ensue when human beings enter into bitter

conflict. It is a game played against cunning, adaptive and resourceful adversaries who

will always try to resist those they perceive to be their persecutors by blending into their

cultural backgrounds - and by making those around them believe they are under threat

too.

In the final analysis, the techniques we propose are, just like all military techniques,

capable of being used for good or ill. We have mentioned that psychometric instruments

have probably been used to recruit corporate psychopaths. We have also mentioned that

360-degree performance appraisal began in unsavoury circumstances where in many

cases it was used to weed out dissent against institutionalised psychopathic behaviour.

This serves as a stark reminder that guidance on combatting CP can also guide the

psychopathic corporation to protect itself.

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