Aggression and Violent Behavior 34 (2017) 117–119

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Aggression and Violent Behavior

A note on workplace psychopathic bullying – Measuring its frequency

and severity
Clive Boddy a,⁎, Ross Taplin b
a
Middlesex University, Dept. of Leadership, Work and Organisations, Hendon Campus, W133, William Building, United Kingdom
b
Curtin University of Technology, Dept. of Audit, Assurance & Accounting Technologies, Bentley Campus, 407.405A, Perth, Western Australia, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In this short paper we discuss methods of measurement for investigating bullying under workplace psychopaths.
Received 12 May 2016 We find that past estimates of bullying under workplace psychopaths may be too low due to the use of inade-
Received in revised form 2 February 2017 quate scales. We conclude that the use of actual numerical values is preferential for measuring psychopathic bul-
Accepted 6 February 2017
lying due to the highly skewed nature of the results. Further, non-numerical measures of the severity of bullying
Available online 11 February 2017
may also need to adopt extreme end point descriptors in order to capture the severe violence of the threats that
Keywords:
may be made by a psychopathic manager.
Bullying © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Measurement
Psychopathy
Workplace psychopaths
Corporate psychopath
toxic leadership

Contents

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
2. Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
3. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

1. Introduction (Harvey, Treadway, & Heames, 2007) in addition to personality based

elements (Harvey, Treadway, Heames, & Duke, 2009).
Bullying and aggressive behavior in the workplace is an important Psychopathy in the workplace is an emerging area of research which
area of research in organizational studies and leadership because of also has important correlates and consequences (Andrews, Furniss, &
the consequential nature of the behavior (Baillien & De Witte, 2009; Evans, 2009; Boddy, 2014; Lilienfeld, Latzman, Watts, Smith, & Dutton,
Baillien, Neyens, De Witte, & De Cuyper, 2009; Baillien et al., 2014; 2014; Lilienfeld et al., 2012; Lilienfeld, Watts, & Smith, 2015; Moreira,
Einarsen, 1999; Einarsen, Aasland, & Skogstad, 2007; Einarsen, Almeida, Pinto, & Fávero, 2014; Skeem, Poythress, Edens, Lilienfeld, &
Skogstad, & Glasø, 2013; Harvey, Heames, & Richey, 2006). Workplace Cale, 2003; Smith & Lilienfeld, 2013).
bullies are destructive leaders who may be anti-social and psychopathic Bullying and psychopathy are frequently linked. For example, in re-
(Harvey et al., 2007) or who may be driven by more contextual factors search into the dark triad of psychopaths, narcissists and Machiavellians
(Paulhus & Williams, 2002) bullying most strongly relates to psycho-
paths followed by Machiavellians and then narcissists (Baughman,
Dearing, Giammarco, & Vernon, 2012). This is important for many rea-
⁎ Corresponding author.
sons, for example, because it appears to be through their influence on
E-mail addresses: C.Boddy@mdx.ac.uk (C. Boddy), R.Taplin@cbs.curtin.edu.au bullying, conflict and related variables that workplace psychopaths are
(R. Taplin). one of the main determinants of job satisfaction (Boddy & Taplin,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2017.02.001
1359-1789/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
118 C. Boddy, R. Taplin / Aggression and Violent Behavior 34 (2017) 117–119
2016). Practitioners have noticed this correlation and for example, a se-
nior UK psychiatrist argues that in order to help organizations avoid the
adverse effects (including endemic bullying) of having psychopathic
people within them, then leadership development should include learn-
ing the art of managing psychopathic employees (de Silva, 2014).
However, the scope of this research note is not to discuss this impor-
tance or to define either bullying or workplace psychopathy but rather
to make two simple points concerning the frequency and severity of
such bullying and how it may be measured. These points can be consid-
ered when designing future research into the relationship between
workplace psychopathy and bullying.
Firstly, the aim of this research note is to alert psychopathy and bul-
lying researchers to the implications of the frequency of psychopathic
bullying recently found in (UK) qualitative research. In this UK study
of the ways in which psychopathic managers relate to their subordi-
nates the most frequent incidence of bullying was four times per day, in-
volving four different employees, in an open-plan office, being bullied
by one psychopathic manager (Boddy, Miles, Sanyal, & Hartog, 2015).
This means there is, in this study, a potential total number of incidences
of bullying of twenty times per week or around 960 times per work
year. Secondly, in terms of severity, within the same qualitative study
one other case of psychopathic bullying involved the use of coercion
and threats of severe violence from a psychopathic manager.
Psychopaths are associated with instrumental violence rather than
reactive (emotionally driven) violence (Blair, 2001). In the UK study
death threats were directed towards the other family members of an
employee in order to coerce that employee towards continuing to com-
ply with a fraudulent scheme initiated by the psychopathic manager.
Fraud, workplace psychopaths and murder have been associated in pre-
vious research (Perri, 2010, 2011; Perri & Brody, 2012). In the UK qual-
itative research the employee threatened to expose the fraud and the
psychopathic manager reacted with this threat of extreme violence.
2. Discussion
There are several implications of this for further research. Firstly, it
may be that scales providing participants with a few options to catego-
rize their response, such as in a 5 point or 9 point item scale cannot ad-
equately capture the frequency (or severity) of the bullying perpetrated
by psychopathic managers. This is because such scales can be limited in
their range.
To simplify the questionnaire for participants and for later data entry
and analysis, questionnaire designers often create just a few answers.
An example of this is when we ask for the participants' age. We might
use categories: ‘up to 20; 21–40; 41–60; 61 +’. As researchers we are
not concerned about respondents' exact ages and in this example we
know there is an upper limit (since people do not live forever and real-
istically we will have no one, or very few people, over 80 if we are study-
ing people who are working). This is a reason why using such age
categories works. We do not have problems with “outliers” because
they cannot exist and the age categories are typically of equal sizes
(for example, a range of 20 years each) so if we replace everyone's age
in one group (e.g. everyone between 21 and 40) with the midpoint
(30) then we get a good approximation.
Questionnaire designers often aim for possible responses that are
equally distant in this way as it results in calculating quantities such as
means more meaningful. Whether the original values are replaced
with values such as 1, 2, 3 or the midpoints are used does not make an
important difference in terms of the statistical analysis as long as the ad-
jacent categories can be considered equally distant. In attempting to
measure bullying we are dealing with a situation where the values are
highly skewed – most people give low values such as 0 but a few people
experience or witness a lot of bullying. Most of the bullying that occurs
in the workplace is probably experienced or witnessed by just a few
people. This makes capturing the situation statistically more difficult.
However we are trying to capture something that is already numerical,
e.g. the number of bullying events per day or per year.
In terms of measuring the number of bullying instances there are at
least two problems. Firstly there is a need to capture the very high num-
bers because these are where the interest lies and can be the cause of
most of the overall bullying that is taking place. Secondly, the categories
that could be used are unlikely to be equidistant because of the need for
many categories at the low end to differentiate between people where
most of the responses lie, combined with the necessity for wider catego-
ries where fewer people are expected.
For example, the questionnaire may have categories of: 0; 1–2; 3–5;
6–20; 21+ bullying incidences per week. If these categories were made
equidistant they would look something like: 0–5; 6–10; 11–15; 16–20;
21+ but this has the disadvantage that the large number of people in
the 0–5 range cannot be differentiated, and it makes a big difference
whether these are mostly 0 or 5 values.
The other problem is that the analyst does not then know how large
the value might be in the 21+ category, but it could be extremely large.
Therefore if pre-coded frequency intervals are to be used as a scale to be
presented to respondents, then a top frequency interval should include
very high frequencies such as 20 times per week or 960 times per year. A
consideration of these measurement difficulties strongly implies that
measures using actual frequencies, e.g. using real numbers in terms of
respondents having experienced/witnessed/observed bullying, may be
preferential. One solution to this problem is therefore to ask participants
to give a value (without any prompting or requirement to fit into a pre-
defined category). For example, on a paper survey a space could be left
for respondents to write in their numerical value.
Another advantage of collecting such numerical data is that a more
precise calculation can be made of the proportion and frequency of bul-
lying associated with each type of manager or workplace environment.
This more exact data is also more informative. For example, knowing
that under normal managers, workplace bullying is observed about six
times per year but under corporate psychopath managers it is observed
about eighty-five times per year (Boddy, 2014) gives a more profound
understanding of the problem than mean scores on a 5 or 9 point item
scale. Further precision, as one reviewer of this paper pointed out,
could also be built into the data by asking by asking respondents to
quantify the amount of bullying of different types or sources, such as
whether it was initiated by a manager or colleague. Supplementary
questions using Likert style scales could additionally be asked to allow
for more commonly used types of data analysis to be performed.
Past research into the frequency of psychopathic bullying indicated
that workplace psychopaths may be responsible for 26% to 35% of all
bullying (Boddy, 2011, 2014). However, the qualitative research
(Boddy et al., 2015) indicates that the scale used in this earlier research
was inadequate. This is because the topmost of the five point interval
scale used was “every day”, i.e. a frequency measure of five times per
week. This limited the measurement capture of the frequency of the
items within conflict (arguments, yelling, rudeness and bullying) to
240 times per year (assuming a 48 week work year). However, based
on qualitative findings the workplace conflict and bullying may occa-
sionally have been much more frequent than that. The omission in the
design of the initial bullying frequency scale illustrates the value of un-
dertaking qualitative research in areas which are exploratory.
Until the qualitative research was complete the researcher who de-
signed the questionnaire used in the quantification, simply did not en-
visage bullying taking place more than once per day.
Another potential source of error in measuring bullying is from
respondent's telescoping of events. Telescoping is an error of temporal
displacement. Respondents may recall an event, even a highly salient
event, but report that it happened earlier than it actually did (backward
telescoping) or report that it happened more recently (forward
telescoping) (Gaskell, Wright, & O'Muircheartaigh, 2000). Forward
telescoping has been found to be more common (Lessler & Sirken,
1985; Sudman, Finn, & Lannom, 1984). Taking respondent's memory
 C. Boddy, R. Taplin / Aggression and Violent Behavior 34 (2017) 117–119
capability into account means that for practical purposes, to try and
avoid telescoping and help ensure answer validity, ideally respondents
should be asked to answer questions that are within their recent expe-
rience. For example, how many times they witnessed bullying in the
past week rather than the past year. However, we know that many em-
ployees only witness bullying infrequently, or very infrequently. For
many people bullying will only have been experienced in the past
year and so answer categories with relatively long time frames are
needed. However, there is a danger of respondent's forward telescoping
from this, which may artificially boost the average reported frequency
of bullying. There are thus potential problems at both ends of the fre-
quency scale involved with the measurement of bullying. It could be
therefore, that a longitudinal, daily-diary method of data collection
may produce the most accurate results, and even then this is provided
that research participants fill in their diaries conscientiously.
3. Conclusions
Because of scale inadequacies in past research the current estimates
(26% to 35%) of the proportion of all workplace bullying that may be at-
tributed to the presence of psychopathic managers may be too low. Psy-
chopathic bullying could be more frequent than currently estimated
and scales to measure this should take the highly skewed nature and
in particular the high frequency of psychopathic bullying into account.
Collecting actual numbers to indicate the frequency of bullying will be
the most accurate and useful method. This could be undertaken in sur-
vey questionnaires or via diary collection methods. Scales and measures
of the severity of bullying may also be advised to adopt extreme end
point descriptors in order to capture the severe violence of the threats
(e.g. death threats) that may be made by a psychopathic manager.
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