Inside the Mind of the Bully: Pathology and Personality
摘要
This section examines workplace bullying as the interplay of individual traits and enabling systems. Bridging clinical, personality, and organizational psychology, it highlights subclinical Cluster B and Dark Triad traits—narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy—plus low Honesty–Humility and Agreeableness (HEXACO). Rather than a diagnostic “profile,” it advances a pattern-based view: these traits turn harmful in climates that valorize dominance, diffuse accountability, and allow procedural manipulation. Extending Leymann’s mobbing model, it shows how administrative psychopathy and toxic leadership convert policies, evaluations, and grievance systems into tools of coercion, producing cumulative psychological and organizational harm. Case illustrations from health care, policing, and academia demonstrate how rigid hierarchies and ambiguous controls endanger both targets and bystanders. Effective prevention requires structural—not just individual—interventions: redesign reporting pathways, strengthen independent oversight, and address follower susceptibility and contextual enablers within the “toxic triangle.” Recasting bullying, harassment, and sexual abuse as occupational violence and a public-health problem shifts responsibility from victims to systems and centers accountability, primary prevention, and trauma-informed supports.