Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work - Hardcover

Babiak, Dr. Paul; Hare, Dr. Robert D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060837721 ISBN 13: 9780060837723

Publisher: ReganBooks, 2006

Synopsis

Provides a revealing study of psychopaths in the business world that examines the impact of destructive psychopathic behavior on a work environment, documenting a psychopath's patterns of skilled manipulation, deception, and abuse and providing essential tools to help readers protect themselves and their companies. 50,000 first printing.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Let's say you're about to hire somebody for a position in your company. Your corporation wants someone who's fearless, charismatic, and full of new ideas. Candidate X is charming, smart, and has all the right answers to your questions. Problem solved, right? Maybe not.

We'd like to think that if we met someone who was completely without conscience -- someone who was capable of doing anything at all if it served his or her purposes -- we would recognize it. In popular culture, the image of the psychopath is of someone like Hannibal Lecter or the BTK Killer. But in reality, many psychopaths just want money, or power, or fame, or simply a nice car. Where do these psychopaths go? Often, it's to the corporate world.

Researchers Paul Babiak and Robert Hare have long studied psychopaths. Hare, the author of Without Conscience, is a world-renowned expert on psychopathy, and Babiak is an industrial-organizational psychologist. Recently the two came together to study how psychopaths operate in corporations, and the results were surprising. They found that it's exactly the modern, open, more flexible corporate world, in which high risks can equal high profits, that attracts psychopaths. They may enter as rising stars and corporate saviors, but all too soon they're abusing the trust of colleagues, manipulating supervisors, and leaving the workplace in shambles.

Snakes in Suits is a compelling, frightening, and scientifically sound look at exactly how psychopaths work in the corporate environment: what kind of companies attract them, how they negotiate the hiring process, and how they function day by day. You'll learn how they apply their "instinctive" manipulation techniques -- assessing potential targets, controlling influential victims, and abandoning those no longer useful -- to business processes such as hiring, political command and control, and executive succession, all while hiding within the corporate culture. It's a must read for anyone in the business world, because whatever level you're at, you'll learn the subtle warning signs of psychopathic behavior and be able to protect yourself and your company -- before it's too late.

Synopsis

Dr. Robert Hare has devoted more than three decades of his professional career to the investigation of the psychopath and how psychopathic behavior influences and corrupts society. Hare is the creator of the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R), a twenty item personality checklist. There is no doubt that everyone has come in contact and possibly been deceived by a psychotic personality. In fact, most disturbingly, it's the nature of a psychopath to initially come across as very appealing and likable. How do you defend yourself against such a person in the workplace? In "Snakes in Suits", industrial and corporate psychologist Dr. Paul Babiak teams up with Dr. Hare to focus on the psychopath's role in modern corporations. Together they created the B-scan, a personality test for job candidates so that employers can identify potential psychopaths. As today's business world has perfect conditions for the psychopath, "Snakes in Suits" informs the reader how to spot him before he destroys. It reveals the psychopath's secrets, introduces the ways in which they manipulate and deceive, and helps readers see through their games.

The rapid pace of today's corporate environment provides the perfect breeding ground for these employees, and "Snakes in Suits" will give readers the necessary tools to protect themselves and their companies before it's too late.

Edition details

• Publisher: ReganBooks
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0060837721
• ISBN 13: 9780060837723
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 356