Successful Psychopathy in Vocational Contexts

The personality trait of psychopathy incorporates features of “superficial charm, dishonesty, egocentricity, risk-taking, and a lack of empathy and guilt masked by apparent normalcy” (Smith & Lilienfeld in Aggress Violent Behav 18:206, 2013). The trait has been mostly associated with detrimental outcomes. However, there are also reports of quite successful psychopaths and the seemingly paradoxical idea of two faces of psychopathy has fueled an emerging literature on successful psychopathy. In this chapter, we first discuss two problems that have hitherto hampered consistent approaches to the question of successful psychopathy: there is a lack of a homogenous definition of the trait and the question of what is implied by successful psychopathy. To overcome these problems, we use a triarchic perspective on psychopathy that has proven to be promising in the work context. We define successful psychopathy as achieving desirable outcomes rather than just the avoidance of undesirable ones. We then introduce different approaches of how successful psychopathy might actually look like and present empirical results regarding successful psychopathy in the workplace. In the latter, we also distinguish between “truly” successful cases and cases of success that, from the organization’s perspective, represent toxic careers. Finally, we provide an overview of the implications of these findings for practice.