How to spot a corporate psychopath and avoid hiring a candidate with sociopathy

• Corporate psychopaths are drawn to powerful institutions and good at climbing a corporate ladder.
• An expert explains how these people destabilize the companies they're part of.

They're calculated, charming, and charismatic, but you don't want them in your company. Corporate psychopaths are drawn to positions of power, and may be in your field.

Corporate psychopaths excel at breaching companies and climbing up promotional ladders, Clive Boddy, the head of the School of Management at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK, told Insider.

He gave a presentation about his most recent research, which posthumously diagnosed Bernie Madoff as a corporate psychopath, this week at the Chelmsford Science Festival.

Boddy said that once they've made their way in and up, corporate psychos often stop doing what's best for the company and instead act in their own best interest.

That can spell trouble for a company, leading to a highly toxic work environment, full of personnel turnover that can cost "either a lot of money or a lot of emotional distress, and sometimes quite often both," said Boddy, who's dedicated much of his career to studying corporate psychopaths and is credited in helping make the topic popular.

Boddy said corporate psychopaths are one of the reasons that we've had multiple financial catastrophes in the past few decades, from Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, to Jeffrey Skilling's role in Enron, to the bankers who contributed to the great recession in 2008.

How to know if your coworker is on the psychopath scale

It's estimated that 3% to 20% of higher ups in corporate world are psychopaths, according to a study by the Australian Psychological Society. By comparison, about 1% of the general population meets most of the criteria for psychopathy.

Psychopathy is diagnosed on a scale based on how closely a person embodies 20 different characteristics.

Even without an official diagnosis, however, you might be able to tell if you're dealing with one of these characters, especially if you work below them, Boddy said.

Since corporate psychopaths usually trick their superiors into thinking they're high performers and then cut corners, slack off, and outright lie once it serves them, the people who work beneath them are usually the first ones to notice troubling signs.

It might start when you see your coworker acting untrustworthy, claiming others' work as their own, and bragging about credentials they don't seem to have. Then, you might see them willing to bully coworkers, and try to turn people against each other.

Basically, if you see someone act "totally ruthless in determination to accrue money and power and control," they might be a corporate psychopath, Boddy said.

How to avoid hiring psychos in the first place

Boddy said that issuing more stringent hiring practices could be enough to weed out corporate psychopath candidates in the future.

To start, companies should check candidates' credentials thoroughly since corporate psychopaths often forge their credentials and overstate their skills.

It would also be helpful to check out the references they listed, and see if they can get perspectives from any of the people that worked under them previously.

One company even used a corporate psychologist. The psychologist identified a psychopath who was up for promotion and, at least, was able to prevent that person from rising through the company, Boddy said.

In the end, it's difficult to tell how successful these approaches really are since organizations typically avoid publicly discussing psychopaths within the company, Boddy said.