Horrible managers need to be eliminated at HK workplaces to enhance employee innovation

It is a story we are far too familiar with in Hong Kong business. The manager who does little work, plays colleagues off against one another, shirks responsibilities and then simply disappears for long periods for an “off-site meeting”.

When threatened, they swing into action, undermining competent colleagues who might expose their defects and ensuring the ideas of these staff are quashed. On a really bad day, those ideas might even be passed off as their own.

Many of us have worked with a manager who has been ruthless, manipulative and prepared to step on lesser workers to give themselves a boost. These bad bosses combine ineffective and sometimes harmful leadership practises with negative personality characteristics to create a nightmare for their colleagues.

These traits seem to be more common in smaller businesses, where the manager is also the boss, and quite often an entrepreneur who has built the company from the ground up.

A new study at the UNSW Business School now suggest that there is a correlation between psychopathic and entrepreneurial tendencies. We have discovered that participants with personalities high in either psychopathic tendencies or entrepreneurial intentions persisted in a risk-taking task even in the face of repeated and strong adversity.