Corporate Psychopathy Reconceptualised: An Interdisciplinary Review of Moral Cognition, Economic Behaviour, and Organisational Integrity

Abstract

Traditionally, psychopathy has been known as a clinical syndrome that involves emotional detachment, manipulativeness and a lack of moral engagement, and has recently been studied as a functional personality trait in organizational and economic environments. Despite the burgeoning multi- or trans-disciplinary focus of this field, the literature so far is still very fragmentary, methodologically challenged, and poorly integrated at multiple levels of analysis. A narrative review of the literature provides a synthesis of evidence related to the personality psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioural economics, and corporate governance literature to develop a theoretically informed description of the potential influence of psychopathic traits on moral cognition and institutional behaviour, specifically the callous-unemotional and interpersonal-dominance dimensions. The domains explored are the complex, non-linear link between psychopathic traits and economic performance; the neuro-economic and cognitive foundations of moral decision-making; corporate governance systems that can inadvertently support psychopathic agency; structural vulnerability of the financial sector to psychopathic behaviour; the potential for erosion of ethical climate through organisational toxicity; and the moderation of exploitative behaviour by intelligence. Unlike previous models of psychopathy (Haidt, 2001; Greene et al., 2001, 2004; Bandura, 1999), the review proposes a model of bounded moral rationality that is explicitly differentiated from those models. Formal, falsifiable theoretical propositions are drawn and methodological limitations (such as issues of construct validity, measurement heterogeneity, and the missing clinical-to-subclinical inference) are discussed extensively.