Is your boss a psychopath?

Femelade

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss-quiz.html


is your boss a psychopath? ok this test must be old cos it refers to your boss as a "he", i have 2 female bosses and 3 male so i wasnt sure who to pick, i went with one of the females that i see most of and she scored:

0.

so there you go.

Capt'n Midnight

Pretty scary when you consider how many companies are in the hands of "corporate psychopaths". It's what capitalism does, brings them to the surface.

Femelade

yeah i do a forensic psychology course and apparantly, there's a checklist thats done on psychopaths and business men usually score quite high on this.

AngryBadger

Well I'm my own boss, so I'd say yeah, my boss is a total psychopath. I hear tel he needs to kill a puppy to reach orgasm :eek:

Terry

i find myself agreeing with most of your posts and i too am my own boss.
then again, i've known for years that i'm a psychopath and i don't try to hide that fact either.

democrates

I'm my own boss also, but I've gotten over being a psychopath (and I was rarely a sociopath). Now I'm a people person, I've got ethics!

For many years I'd been an employee, and I've no complaints about any of my bosses, though in latter years I hated having a boss. The drive to do what I believed was best for customers became too strong. Bosses are often victims of the central command hierarchy. Top down driven, with lip service to the experience of those doing the job.

Truth is, worldwide we have an anti-social version of the old Freidrich Winslow Taylor scientific management system being rolled out. In the market scale is everything. As you grow, you factor the work, divide it out into simpler jobs and hire people on low wages to perform these simple tasks. Call centres are white-collar factories. Same thing over and over. The task for shareholder-driven managers is to break every job into yellow pack components.

In that environment yes, supervisors under pressure appear like psychopaths, but notice how you like them in person, in a social setting...

jonny68

I actually get on very well with my boss he's very easy going and we talk Football quite a lot which is great,nothing worse than not being able to talk Football in the job (not including the ladys of course) and instead talking about any old rubbish that might not necessarily interest you

Stark

What a **** quiz. Starts off with innocent things (I know a lot of people like that, they're not psychopaths), then moves onto "yeah duh, you could have just saved space and asked 'Is he a psychopath'".

Paranoid nonsense. Can't deny that there are quite a few corporate psychopaths out there, but that page is complete rubbish.

democrates

Stark wrote:

What a **** quiz. Starts off with innocent things (I know a lot of people like that, they're not psychopaths), then moves onto "yeah duh, you could have just saved space and asked 'Is he a psychopath'".

Paranoid nonsense. Can't deny that there are quite a few corporate psychopaths out there, but that page is complete rubbish.

I think you're right that a paranoid type would say yes to all those questions, but they are in fact the key defining attributes of a psychopath.

In 'Case Studies in Abnormal Psycholgy' (4th Ed., Oltmanns, Neal, Davison 1995) the psychopath example given (Bill - name changed) had never been in therapy (true to form), but matched all the criteria as on that web page.

There seems to be a scale of emotional intensity experience among people, as in every other attribute of our being, but I think it's the extremes that get noticed. Capitalism itself is the very definition of psychopathy.