Is there a Psychopath in your office?

When we think of psychopaths, disturbing images of Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates will probably spring to mind. However according to a new book entitled “Snakes in Suits” by Professor Robert Hare and Paul Babiak, psychopaths may already be working in your very own office.

Professor Hare, an expert on Psychopathy, claims that Psychopaths are impulsive individuals who lack empathy and remorse for others. They are extremely controlling and crave power and prestige. If this might sound familiar to you, then Professors Hare and Babiak suggest that psychopaths often rise to prominent positions within organisations, take high risks, cause conflict and then leave the company in shambles before moving onto the next high profile role. Some have suggested that one may be the former Daily Mirror tycoon Robert Maxwell, who stole £400m from pension funds to help his ailing companies.

The challenge is to spot these psychopathic individuals in the first place. Psychopaths interview well and often charm their way into an organisation. Yet particularly with senior appointments some companies will use little more than an interview to select their key people. Therefore we should think more carefully about how we recruit our senior roles to ensure that we reduce the risk of hiring the next Hannibal Lecter.

You have been warned!

Time = Money? - Depends on how you earn it

'Time is money'. But do you think of time as having a monetary value? According to Sanford DeVoe and Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford University in America, your answer could well depend on whether you are paid by the hour.

If someone sees their time as having a financial worth, then it follows that any time they don't spend earning money is essentially lost revenue. DeVoe and Pfeffer found that of over 10,000 employees, those who were paid by the hour were significantly more likely to say that, given the choice, they would choose to work more hours for more money, rather than fewer hours for less money. This held true even after controlling for a raft of factors like current weekly income and number of hours worked.

The findings have implications for how we are paid and for the modern drive towards flexible working arrangements. You might think that the option of an hourly rate and flexible hours would free you up to spend more time on what really matters to you in life. But these results suggest such an arrangement would lead you to view time as money, making it hard to resist working longer hours.

Man Flu? - Men are more resilient than you think..

Thwarting those who might have us believe that Man Flu is a real phenomena and potentially costly to industry - researchers seem to have shown that men actually have a higher tolerance to pain than women.

Esmeralda Garcia and colleagues used a device to apply pressure to 12 pairs of pressure points on the bodies of 12 men and 18 women. Nine of these pairs of points were the so-called 'tender points' used to diagnose fibromyalgia (chronic diffuse pain), on each side of the body.

As the pressure on these points was increased, the participants were asked to indicate when they first experienced pain, as distinct from unpleasantness or discomfort. Men showed greater pain thresholds at all three of the pairs of control points and two of the pairs of tender points.

Quest Duty Consultant suggests that it could be more a case of blokes being macho about it and holding out longer.... ?