USD Professor Simon Croom Pens Fortune Article on Prevalence of Psychopathy in Corporate Leadership

Simon Croom is a professor of supply chain management at the University of San Diego School of Business whose recent research has pivoted from topics surrounding supply chain to disordered personality in executives. In an article published by Fortune magazine, Professor Croom discusses findings that 12 percent of corporate leaders are psychopaths and the implications of such traits in senior management.

Excerpt from Fortune:

Over the past year, there’s been a spike of interest in the intersections between leadership and psychopathy, partly fueled perhaps by the former presidency of Donald Trump. While Trump’s behavior fueled much public outrage, psychopathy in the workplace, or corporate psychopathy, arguably has a more direct impact on our lives. 

Corporate psychopathy, particularly in high-level leaders, causes much suffering and is therefore an ethical issue. But there’s another issue as well: It potentially costs businesses billions of dollars every year. We need to become more aware of corporate psychopathy as an economic problem if we’re going to do something about it. 

My colleagues and I found in our research that 12% of corporate senior leadership displays a range of psychopathic traits, which means psychopathy is up to 12 times more common among senior management than among the general population. 

Not every CEO or executive on the spectrum of psychopathy shows obvious signs. Some people may be milder cases, and even among more serious cases, many psychopaths excel at avoiding detection. But when some of the defining traits of psychopathy include egocentricity, predatoriness, recklessness, a lack of empathy, and a propensity for manipulation and exploitation, it doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to see how a high percentage of unrecognized psychopathy in senior management could lead to all kinds of problems for organizations, their employees, their customers, and society at large—including billions of dollars of losses annually and reduced shareholder wealth. 

Why, then, is this problem not addressed? Largely because...