Offensive Squid

sheila said:

Sociopathy is fascinating (another reason I like the Rifters trilogy, given the sociopaths), so I think about it a lot.

fluffy blog post. Emotional Intelligence: What can it really tell us about leadership?

(I think most of these types of articles are going to be fluffy due to the difficulty of coming up with a decent methodology for digging in to the topics)

So, that article isn't about sociopaths, but I have read in the common press about how sociopaths are more successful in corporate environs. Any thoughts on whether sociopathy is orthogonal to level of EQ? Maybe EQ has the same distribution in sociopaths as in non-sociopaths and it is just the case that other things influence their behavior such that it doesn't matter.

Ps. I'm not sure whether "sociopath" or "psychopath" fits or they are interchangable

on edit: Wow, that was quick. I had posted a small comment asking for thoughts on the topic, and I got a helpful followup from the blogger. If you are interested in the topic, go there.

There's an interesting question!

My main worry in this is how do you define "leadership."  That is so broad, functionally. 

I can agree that people can have a good working knowledge of how people behave - when I do x, they do y – without being forced to feel their other person's pain or pleasure as their own, or when feeling it, not finding it a deterrent for behaving selfishly.  I'd think these factors probably are more complex than just two axes – sociopathy and leadership.  Also, are we sure leadership is some static quality of the man, as opposed to an interactional entity that arises when decisions have to be made.  Just a thought.

I think the concept that "sociopaths make good CEOs" is a good soundbite, and it dovetails neatly with the stereotype of capitalists as greedy exploiters of the proletariat, but it's probably the case the CEOs have certain traits in common, but vary widely.

fwiw

PreS: It should be psychopathy not sociopathy.

Dreaming in Code is a book, so I'm linkifying it. I was on my android with the previous comment, so no linkification from me then for I am too lazy.

Anyway, I know there is at least one guy out there who studies scientists in an athropological sort of way, and you get some sort of measurable outputs there, but I still think software projects are better. They are more quotidian. And most shops are going to collect lots and lots of metrics you can sift through to your heart's content. So you have a lot of measurables. probably all wacky and only partially useful. but that's where the animal behaviorist comes in and watches the creatures in the field to go with all of these observations.

Anyway, this is one thing I ponder about, thinking, why was this thing I worked on living hell, why does that team seem like a good team, why do I want to work with this person but not that person… who would I want to hire. how intrinsic are the traits that make someone like someone I'd want to work with… probably not all the way intrinsic, so then how do we influence people to have those traits.

There was an article I saw that mentioned qualities of a team (not software engineers) that performed better on some tasks than other teams, and it didn't have to do as much with the measure of intelligence of individuals but with the types of behaviors that groups engaged in such as talking in turns.

I've worked in the middle layer of a stack, and I also now work on a framework used by most of the apps here. I feel that people in our group should have good social behaviors along with the good smart engineer behaviors. I like watching how things go as we work on our work but also interacting with other people as they work with what we work on.

finally read more of the paper

Consistent with recent concerns about a “dark side” of EI (Austin, Far- relly, Black, & Moore, 2007; Jordan et al., 2010), however, it also seems reasonable to assume that one’s emotional abilities could be used to manip- ulate others. To test these notions, future research should examine the connections between EI and measures of ethical (Brown & Trevin ̃o, 2006) or authentic (Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Werns- ing, & Peterson, 2008) leadership behavior. If EI is found to promote (un)ethical leadership behav- ior, this would suggest significant alterations to organizations’ EI development activities (Linde- baum, 2009). Interestingly, Austin and her col- leagues (2007) reported a negative relationship between EI and Machiavellianism (i.e., manipu- lative behavior in order to promote self-interest), somewhat alleviating concerns about a potential dark side of EI.