Search results

The study of corporate psychopaths has gone from something which some academic peers found somewhat incredible, and even laughable, in 2005, to an area where an increasing amount of research is taking place across many disciplines. The paradigmatic view in 2005 was that psychopaths were criminal and, therefore, to be found in prisons and not in ‘respectable’ corporations. That chapters like this on corporate psychopaths and destructive leadership are now invited in 2020 for inclusion in academic management books that illustrates how relatively quickly the idea that psychopaths are found in corporations has gained acceptance. Nonetheless, destructive, unethical and psychopathic leadership is, by and large, still unexpected in the workplace, and this magnifies its impact as employees struggle to know how to deal with it. Such destructive leadership is also jarring and quite often traumatic for the employees concerned as well as being damaging to the organisations involved. This chapter examines psychopathic leadership and outlines its importance. This subject has been covered before in books and other chapters which describe psychopaths as organisational destroyers and producers of a climate of fear. Therefore, an aim of this chapter is to present some of the most up-to-date findings on corporate psychopaths and how they influence their environment via abusive supervision involving discrimination, ridicule and lowered job satisfaction. Abusiveness and unfairness lead to employees experiencing workplace stress and reduced mental health. The implications of corporate psychopathy for corporate legal responsibility are only just being considered as lawyers, ethicists and philosophers engage with this difficult subject.

The purpose of this paper is to present evidence to examine the possible psychopathy of Robert Maxwell, a notorious figure in UK business history.

This paper presents research which retrospectively applied a tool to measure whether leading figures in twentieth century business history could be classified as being corporate psychopaths. As background to this idea, psychopaths and corporate psychopaths are defined. A measure of corporate psychopathy is explored as an aid to identifying corporate psychopaths in business history. This measure is then used in relation to senior corporate executives who have been nominated as potential corporate psychopaths and to Robert Maxwell in particular.

The paper concludes that at least some ethical scandals and failures such as those at The Daily Mirror have been characterized by the presence of CEOs who scored highly on a measure of corporate psychopathy. Maxwell’s fraudulent raiding of corporate pension funds crossed ethical and legal borders. Furthermore, Maxwell’s fraudulent looting of those pension funds crossed generational boundaries; stealing from older people’s pension funds and thereby leaving younger people/investors with less to inherit. Maxwell also had an international business empire and so his fraud had effects which crossed geographic borders. The paper concludes that using an historical approach to the study of potential corporate psychopaths illuminates what types of organizational outcomes corporate psychopaths may eventuate.

The paper is the first to use an historical approach to the study of potential corporate psychopaths.

This current paper reviews the theoretical speculations concerning psychopaths in the workplace that were originally presented in a paper published in this journal in 2006. The 2006 paper was called: “The Dark Side of Management Decisions: Organisational Psychopaths”.

This is a review of the literature on workplace psychopaths since 2006.

This current paper determines that while many of these prior speculations about workplace psychopaths have since been supported by evidence, several others remain unexplored. This finding suggests that several important avenues for further research remain in this important area. In particular, links between corporate psychopaths, bullying and lowered corporate social responsibility have been established. On the other hand, links between corporate psychopaths, career advancement, fraud, and corporate failure as exemplified in the 2007 global financial crisis, have been under-explored.

Corporate psychopaths are worthy of further research because of their impact on society, for example on corporate social responsibility and their willingness to dump toxic waste material illegally.

The paper provides an extensive review of research into corporate psychopaths to date and highlights areas where further investigation would be potentially rewarding.

This paper aims to investigate and comment critically on the influence that an observable career requirement for marketing academics, the PhD, has on their teaching, their research, and the much‐debated “gap” between marketing academics and marketing practitioners.

A review of the literature and of secondary sources of general data is combined with the author's own past research findings to arrive at a coherent, personal point of view.

A strong focus on “scientific” research in the marketing discipline has caused a form of academic myopia, and precipitated a debate on the role of research in business schools, somewhat belatedly. The conclusion in this paper is that academic research skills, and doctoral study in particular, are not a de facto prerequisite for effective teaching of an applied discipline to future practitioners. The PhD is not necessarily the good predictor of future publication that it is assumed to be. The research output of doctoral researchers, typically with little or no business, is seen as irrelevant by business, contributing to the academic‐practitioner divide.

The findings link current recruitment policies with future performance, and rekindle the debate on the pernicious role of the PhD in marketing education.

The author dares to question the research foundations on which modern universities have built themselves, and the role of doctoral research in the transmission of knowledge from business schools to business.

This paper seeks to investigate the use of projective techniques in Asia‐Pacific markets with particular reference to Taiwan and to compare this with the literature on cultural differences in conducting research to see if any correspondence exists.

The paper is based on a literature review and a small qualitative study of indigenous and expatriate market researchers who work or had recently worked in South Korea, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and Indonesia.

The paper concludes that the use of projective techniques in Asia‐Pacific can be usefully guided by an understanding of the different cultures there compared with the cultures in the UK and other western markets. It illustrates that projective techniques are as used and are as useful in market research in Asia‐Pacific as they are in the UK.

The research fills a gap in the literature and extends knowledge of how projective techniques are used in Asia‐Pacific markets.

Normal “mixed method” approaches to research – using standard quantitative surveys supported by qualitative methods such as semi‐structured interviews, often fail to measure issues “outside of the fence”. The purpose of this paper is to consider whether the challenges of bounded rationality can, in part, be addressed by including projective techniques within the “mixed methods” approach. In particular, it discusses the role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in such an approach.

The results of an international pilot study into the use of projective techniques in assisting the evaluation of policies is outlined. The study is concerned with the response of small businesses to governments' policies aimed at encouraging the adoption of ICT. This is used as the basis of a discussion of the appropriateness of using ICT in such an approach.

ICT could play an important role in the use of projective techniques – including design; improving reliability and validity; distribution; analysis and interpretation.

Much more research is needed before the appropriateness of (ICT based) projective techniques can be assessed fully.

The lessons learnt from this pilot study about the use of projective techniques as part of a “mixed methods” survey methodology was explored. In particular, the paper provides some practical suggestions as to how ICT might be used to reduce the overheads involved in implementing projective techniques.

For many people involved in traditional quantitative and qualitative research the usefulness and appropriateness of projective techniques have yet to be proven. This paper contributes some new thinking about how ICT might address some of the concerns over the suitability of projective techniques as part of a mixed methodology.

The purpose of this paper is to gain deeper insight into the meanings that structure and impel consumer choice by overlaying findings from a metaphor elicitation study onto the results of a traditional means‐end laddering study.

First, laddering interviews were conducted to elicit the reasons that structure the college choice decision of students. A second study using metaphor elicitation techniques surfaced additional meanings that constitute and connect students' thoughts and feelings about their experiences at the college. Together, the two modes of interviewing yield deeper insight into personal relevance and consumer choice than offered by either alone.

Combining two modes of interviewing provides views at various levels of detail. Whereas laddering interviews use direct questioning to identify consumers' choice criteria, projective techniques rely on indirect questioning to surface the enduring and ephemeral feelings that charge consumer beliefs. Panning and zooming from the general structural overview provided by means‐end research to the nuance and detail surfaced by metaphor elicitation provides uncommon insight into the drivers of consumer choice.

The time, effort, skill, and expense required for data collection, analysis, and interpretation are non‐trivial and may limit adoption of the two study approach.

The superimposition of metaphoric meanings onto consumer decision maps provides tremendous added value to managers aiming to enhance the creativity, relevance, and effectiveness of their marketing initiatives.

Melding two interview methods adds depth to means‐end research and lends structure to projective associations. The deeper insights into personal relevance and choice benefit academics and practitioners alike.

The paper arose from an experienced qualitative market researcher's desire to challenge her working methodologies in analysing and interpreting data for commercial clients. Faced with tight deadlines, and working largely on her own, the researcher wished to consider if alternative working practices might be worth the necessary time investment and if outputs could actually be enhanced.

This paper compares the results of projective techniques of qualitative data collection analysed manually with computer‐aided analysis of the same data. Four focus groups were set up. Various creative and projective techniques were incorporated into the groups in order to explore and test the boundaries of both the manual and computer‐based analysis data to the full.

The organisation of data was aided by the use of CAQDAS file management structure, but a general overview of the results was somewhat lost to the researcher. Moreover, visual rather than textual data do not lend itself to computer‐aided analysis, minimising their utility in analysing results from a wide range of projective techniques.

While the objectivity of this introspective, reflective approach may be questionable, using a separate researcher to undertake different methods was neither deemed to enable a direct comparison of the process nor the experience, as seen reflectively through the eyes of the same researcher.

Insights can benefit other commercial market researchers who may be considering using CAQDAS.

The paper explores the analysis of data gathered using projective techniques – a recognised gap in the literature.

The aim of this is to present a new combined, projective technique, the event‐based narrative inquiry technique (EBNIT), and analyze how it adds to traditional interviewing techniques in service development contexts for yielding new service ideas and evaluating current service.

The paper proposes and tests the new EBNIT technique in three service development projects in the information and communication technology field. The technique combines principles from the narrative inquiry technique and critical incident technique (CIT) as well as the use of projective elements in the form of metaphors.

Metaphors combined with lived critical and imaginary events helps to generate creative new service ideas. Customer experiences may be employed to interpret unspoken, tacit knowledge, which is beneficial when companies want to learn and create something new with the customer.

Metaphors are necessary in order to find truly new, customer‐oriented ideas. Through imaginary events, narratives are linked to lived experiences and make new ideas concrete and focused on issues that are relevant for customers in their daily lives in a broad context. In contrast to using solely CIT, narratives result in a dialogue that includes social and cultural aspects of events.

The narrative inquiry technique has not traditionally been used in service development. The paper suggests that when combined with the CIT and metaphors, narrative analysis becomes a manageable technique, which can be implemented in different service and product development settings.