Corporate Venom

I recently took part in a podcast hosted by my colleague Victoria Soell.  The theme was what neuroscience had to say about narcissism, but rather than pursuing a wide psychological perspective, we focused on so-called ‘narcissistic managers’ in the workplace.  The label is used pejoratively, but just having an inflated regard for oneself hardly characterises the negativity that the phrase is intended to convey.  ‘Psychopathic managers’, a term often used synonymously, does have those connotations, but hijacking a label from a criminological setting is no more helpful (the full podcast can be viewed at https://open.spotify.com/episode/2uyzfhQpMO0OLE79oIaeks?si=a5c26811d50f47f7). 

There are many reasons why particular managers might be less competent, including a lack of appropriate training or having been elevated beyond their ability to fulfil the role.  Our podcast conversation focused instead on managers who may in fact deliver results very effectively, but who create team environments that are negative and toxic.  Their success is part of the problem: they may be promoted to increasingly powerful roles, at significant cost to the widening number of team members reporting to them.

A question we addressed in the podcast was identifying the behaviour that typically characterises these managers, and we drew on one of the scales in the Challenge of Change Profile®, labelled ‘toxic achieving’.  The measure is identified by three traits: time urgency, believing that ends justify means, and anger.  In other words, they want everything done yesterday, they’re not concerned about the costs to anyone else in getting a result, and anger is their default mode if the outcome is not to their satisfaction.

Another common characteristic is that they tend towards the extraversion end of the extraversion-introversion dimension (usually referred to as just extraversion).  There are many theories of extraversion, but the best explanatory model is stimulus intensity modulation.  This suggests that extraverts have relatively low levels of resting basal brain arousal: their stimulus-seeking behaviour is aimed at increasing basal arousal to the optimal level.  Introverts, with relatively high levels, modulate arousal downwards by limiting stimulation, and there is ample research evidence for these differences based on objective measures such as anaesthetic sedation thresholds.

Scores on the Challenge of Change Profile scales all have a preferred direction, either high or low.  This is particularly important with scales such as rumination, where having a low score is definitely preferable.  In contrast, there is no value-judgement inherent in being extraverted or introverted.  Although extraversion is often associated with toxic achieving it isn’t in principle toxic, and relating it to management styles requires a more nuanced view that distinguishes between what might be called benign as opposed to malign ways in which it is expressed. 

There are two related but discrete aspects of extraversion, sociability and impulsivity, and the extraversion scale we developed as part of the Challenge of Change Dream Team® programme was designed to distinguish clearly between them.  Sociability reflects the conventional view of extraverts as outgoing and gregarious, and will tend to have a positive effect on team climate.  Impulsiveness – acting on the first idea that comes to mind without necessarily thinking things through – might easily transform into impatience to get on with the plan, and if thwarted, impatience might in turn transform into anger.  Frustration can often be a precursor to anger, but whether or not that happens is more a function of the degree of habitual toxic achieving behaviour than impulsive extraversion.  Toxic achieving is a sufficient cause of negative anger, independently of how extraverted a person might be.

Toxic corporate behaviour is often excused on the grounds that it gets results, but it isn’t a prerequisite for successful management.  To explore what accounted for more positive ratings of managers by their direct reports, one of our Challenge of Change case studies used a variety of data, including scores on the Profile.  We found that positive ratings overwhelmingly related to measures reflecting the ability to express emotion appropriately and to respond sensitively but objectively to team members’ emotional upsets, and managers who possess these ‘people skills’ are in fact no less productive than toxic achievers, but without the cost to the team. 

There is no doubt about the destructive effects that toxic managers inflict on team members, and their behaviour actually impacts on themselves as well.  Our toxic achieving scale was developed in response to shortcomings in the well-known concept of ‘Type-A behaviour’.  Although somewhat outmoded, research evidence shows that Type-As are significantly more vulnerable to heart disease, no doubt as a consequence of the repeated cardiovascular demand imposed by habitual anger.     

One of the questions we’re asked on our training programmes is what should be done about toxic managers.  The best solution would be to not employ them in the first place or to let them go as soon as the negative effects of their behaviour become known, but employees are often fearful of reporting on these managers, so those responsible for making appointments or promotions may not be aware of the damage these individuals are causing.  However, team members do have an option: subjected to what is often unambiguous bullying by these managers, the best solution is to leave.  

This can sound glib, and there’s no doubt about the challenges that changing jobs can incur, but ask yourself these questions: can you do anything to change these managers’ behaviour, or have them dismissed?  While you should certainly make your feelings known, neither is likely.  Are you waiting in the hope that the managers might themselves move on?  This means living in misery that will impact on both your work and home life, and it might not happen for a long time; even if it does happen, how much control would you have over selecting their replacement?  Saying that life’s too short to surrender it to someone else’s anger is a cliché, but on the occasions when we’ve heard back from people who did leave, they invariably wish they’d done so sooner. 

Generation Tosh

Generational categories – Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Generation Z – are based on the notion that those born within narrow 15-year periods display characteristic behaviour that distinguishes them from those born in years earlier or later.  For example, people born between 1965 and 1980 are supposedly ‘apathetic’, but next generation people are ‘narcissistic’.  Really? 

Like so many anecdotal attempts to categorise people the classification is arbitrary, and has little evidence to support its vague generalisations. Mark McCrindle has dubbed the current cohort (2013-2025) Generation Alpha, a name that is claimed to make sense ‘as it is in keeping with scientific nomenclature’, but switching to Greek doesn’t transform popular mythology into science.  The objection is not so much to arbitrarily creating categories for a bit of fun; the objection is pretending it’s science.        

Are people born between 1981 and 1996 more self-regarding or narcissistic?  The BBC television series ‘Age of the Image’, aired in 2020, opens with a scene of a throng gathered around Michelangelo’s Mona Lisa.  Many will have crossed continents for this opportunity, but what are they all doing?  Taking selfies.  The painting has been relegated to a backdrop for yet another image of beaming, happy me.  The crowd includes people from all age groups; the self-regarding attitude reflected in the scene is no different across supposed generations.  All that’s changed is that cell phones have become more ubiquitous.

Generational ideas have been systematically criticised, most recently and trenchantly by Philip Cohen, who describes the widespread and unquestioning acceptance of these categories as perpetuating a cultural pastiche.  He and other writers do acknowledge the fact of cultural and societal change over time, but tracking it on the basis of misleading categories hinders a proper understanding of complex, reciprocal links between behavioural changes amongst individuals on the one hand, and broad social or technological trends in society on the other.   

Technological innovation usually brings both advantages and disadvantages – obvious examples are nuclear energy or AI.  In the same way, the convenience and immediacy of communication technology is accompanied by the sometimes personally devastating effects of false comparisons.  Presented with endless beaming selfie happiness can make any personal unhappiness seem even deeper; it can be hard to remember that the inane grinning may just be a show put on for the picture, by people who might in fact be equally unhappy.

Demonstrating the validity of ‘soft’ data is certainly problematic, as we discovered when seeking to demonstrate the effects of the Challenge of Change Resilience Training®.  The gold standard, essential in trials of new drug treatments, is the randomised controlled trial.   Our solution was to compare criterion scores for trained participants with scores for groups who had received a dummy training equivalent.  The study was based on a long inter-test interval, and we stratified the samples by factors such as age and job experience as well as controlling for variables such as mutual comparison.  Within those constraints, the training was shown to significantly reduce sickness-absence amongst the test participants compared with the controls (Roger & Hudson, 1995). 

Providing reliable evidence for generational differences is well-nigh impossible, yet references to Generation X, Z or whatever trip off the tongue as if they were real.  Individual people in any generation might well be apathetic or self-regarding, but claiming that these characteristics generalise within age-bands is intellectually irresponsible.  Unfortunately, repeated usage leads to the ‘illusory truth effect’: say something dubious often enough and it gets accepted as being true.  Just so with the generation myth.

Righting Wrongs

‘What’s wrong?’ is a fundamental question in science research, but the motive for posing it is curiosity rather than a cynical attempt to find fault.  It is also not necessarily an argument for the wholesale rejection of existing views that the phrase ‘paradigm shift’ is sometimes taken to imply. Einstein’s theory didn’t render Newton redundant, any more than quantum mechanics replaced relativity.  Progress in science is a cumulative process where existing findings are consolidated or revised, punctuated by occasional large jumps.

The question has a parallel in the work of the English Franciscan friar William, born in Ockham, Surrey, in 1285.  Better known as William of Occam, his lasting legacy is Occam’s Razor, which he expressed in Latin as entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem – ‘entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity’.  In other words, the best answer is the simplest one, and the principle of Occam’s Razor, slicing away redundancy, is a defining feature of science.  Its importance was echoed by the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman’s own version, Feynman’s Razor: if you can’t explain something in simple language you probably don’t understand it.

Research on stress is most often found in psychology, a field in which there is perhaps the least evidence for Occam’s Razor.  The discipline enjoys the cachet of calling itself a science, but is replete with superfluity and obfuscation.  There is no chemobabble or biobabble equivalent to psychobabble.  Psychological findings are also seldom exposed to another cornerstone of science, replication.  Current attempts to rectify this are indeed finding that many of the results might in reality be mere chance effects.  Psychology research does deploy scientific methods, but that doesn’t make it a science.

The programme of research that yielded the evidence base for the Challenge of Change Resilience Training® began in the early 1980s, by interrogating the then-current research on stress and stress management with ‘what’s wrong?’  The answer was ‘most of it’.  One example is the false distinction between so-called ‘good’ and ‘bad’ stress.  They’re both called stress, which confuses the more rational distinction between highly motivating pressure on the one hand, and debilitating stress on the other.  The more recent specious assertion that stress can be your friend simply compounds the misunderstanding.

Another problem was the reliance on life-event scales to measure stress.  The scales list a range of things that might have happened to you over a preceding period, typically three to six months.  Each event supposedly impacts on some hypothetical capacity to adapt, so the more events you endorse the more your capacity is depleted and the more likely you are to suffer from stress.  There have been ample criticisms of the approach over recent decades but it is still widely believed to be true, no doubt because it offers the opportunity to blame something or someone else for your unhappiness.  

Since so much of the earlier work was conceptually and methodologically flawed, we disregarded it entirely in the search for a different approach.  We began by creating a psychometrically reliable instrument for measuring stress, using a unique scenario approach to generate a more objective set of potential items.  Subjecting them to rigorous statistical analysis resulted in the Emotion Control Questionnaire and its sequelae (Roger and co-workers, 1987, 1989, 2011, 2016), which included a prominent scale assessing the tendency to ruminate or churn over emotional upsets. 

The questionnaire presented the first psychometrically adequate measure of rumination, so there was little evidence available to indicate what its role might be in stress.  We sought to find physiological rather than psychological ways to explore this question, and as reported in a previous blog (Blog 62, Liberating Your Mind), we discovered that rumination compromises the homeostatic cycle.  Instead of a natural alternation between peaks of action and troughs of recovery, continuing to ruminate about emotional upsets serves to link the peaks and minimise the troughs, which impacts on both cardiovascular and immune functions.  Rumination also serves to prolong the misery we feel about the upsets, which is why defining stress as ruminating about emotional upsets shows exactly why stress has a negative impact on our well-being.

Given the earlier statement about the cumulative nature of research, what, if anything, can be salvaged from earlier work on stress?  The focus of the Challenge of Change is on what we describe as everyday stress, which we attribute to the process of rumination rather than to the events themselves.  However, exposure to particularly traumatic events might exceed your capacity to cope, and may lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  Contrary to the impression sometimes conveyed in the media, PTSD is rare compared to the widespread experience of everyday stress, but when it occurs it impacts significantly on the lives of sufferers. 

Although rumination still plays a significant role, the source of PTSD is unambiguously a particular event or set of events, and treating the disorder requires intensive intervention to help people come to terms with the event and its aftermath.  The threshold that separates everyday from post-traumatic stress is imprecise, since it might vary from one individual to another and even across different situations for the same person, but PTSD can reliably be diagnosed from a series of explicit symptoms, such as debilitating flash-backs (see also my previous Blog 41, Carried Over The Threshold).

‘What’s wrong?’ is a question that will continue to be posed, and research on rumination will undoubtedly be modified or even superseded by later work, but the extent to which findings are integrated into subsequent research depends on their reliability and validity.  Those with a weak foundation in science might disappear altogether – phrenology is a case in point – but the powerful evidence for the effects of rumination in both experimental and applied contexts will provide a well-established contribution to future developments.