While psychopathy research has been growing for decades, a relatively new area of research is corporate psychopathy. Corporate psychopaths are simply psychopaths working in organizational settings. They may be attracted to the financial, power, and status gains available in senior positions and can cause considerable damage within these roles from a manipulative interpersonal style to large-scale fraud. Based upon prior studies, we analyze psychopathy research pertaining to 23 moral emotions classified according to functional quality and target. Based upon our review, (...) we suggest that psychopaths are high in moral emotions associated with other-directed negative signals, low in self-directed negative signals, and low in other-directed positive signals. We found no empirical articles related to self-directed positive signals. This understanding of the specific moral emotion deficits of corporate psychopaths provides greater theoretical understanding and practical implications of knowing which individuals not to promote, though more research is needed on moral emotions that are faked for manipulative reasons. (shrink)

A sample of 523 newly ordained female Anglican clergy in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales completed the Eysenck Personality Profiler. The data demonstrated that the female clergy tended to be less extravert than women in general, less neurotic than women in general, and less toughminded than women in general. These findings help to clarify the way in which women clergy tend to project a characteristically masculine personality profile in respect of one major dimension of personality, but a characteristically feminine personality (...) profile in respect of the other two major dimensions of personality. (shrink)

We investigate the role of legitimacy in setting organizational goals as a way to address the potential “dark,” unethical side of organizational goal setting. Coupling qualitative and quantitative research methods to better understand legitimacy in goal setting, we first induce novel hypotheses based on observed practice and then provide survey evidence to test the performance implications. Study 1 reports findings based on interviews with twenty-two company executives. We identify attention to goal credibility, prioritization of stakeholders directly involved in the goal’s (...) attainment when setting goals, and communication openness regarding goals, as well as their combination, as being important to organizational performance outcomes. Study 2 determines whether these three practices and their interaction predict performance using a survey conducted with 522 companies across four countries. Among other findings, we contribute to the organizational goal setting literature by showing that higher organizational performance is associated with the amount of priority given to the key actors (typically employees) directly involved with the goal’s attainment. We also find a positive interaction between attention to goal credibility, key actor (employee) importance, and communication openness on financial performance and non-financial goal attainment. Our work takes an initial step toward understanding how organizations can better shape the legitimacy of organizational goals for improved organizational performance and reduced unethical behavior. (shrink)