A Theory of Dickheads

A dickhead is usually treated as an individual problem. Everyone knows one: the arrogant manager, the obstructive bureaucrat, the bully, the loudmouth, the fool with authority who somehow mistakes everybody else’s discomfort for evidence of his own importance. Sutton (2007) documents the damage such people do, and there is no shortage of ordinary experience to fill in the details. But the individual explanation has a peculiar weakness.

Remove one dickhead and, with impressive regularity, another eventually appears. Different office, different institution, different century, remarkably familiar performance. The faces change more readily than the behaviour. People enter worlds already patterned by status, expectation, dependency, precedent, reward and threat. They act within those arrangements and alter them for whoever comes next.

Andersson and Pearson (1999) describe spirals of workplace incivility in which one interaction changes the conditions of the next. Extend that principle beyond incivility and the object begins to move. What looked like a defective person becomes a recurrent organisational possibility. The dickhead is still a person, unfortunately. But the more consequential thing is the shape waiting for someone to occupy it.

That shape is made from relations. Hierarchies require distinction; bureaucracies require boundaries; groups generate insiders and outsiders; institutions turn procedures, credentials, vocabularies and precedent into differences that matter. Status exists only while other people continue to recognise it, defer to it, fear it, reward it or depend upon whatever it controls. Nobody possesses importance in isolation. It has to be continuously supplied.

This creates an awkward selection problem. The behaviour best suited to acquiring and defending a position need not be the behaviour best suited to using it wisely. Confidence can beat reflection. Aggression can protect rank. Obstruction can masquerade as rigour. Humiliation can enforce a hierarchy. Refusing to admit an obvious error can preserve authority precisely because admitting it would alter the relations on which that authority depends.

Research on power, overconfidence, narcissism, leadership emergence, dominance and greed maps different parts of this territory (Keltner, Gruenfeld and Anderson, 2003; Brunell et al., 2008; Fast et al., 2012; Härtel et al., 2023; Krekels and Pandelaere, 2015; Liu et al., 2019). The interesting object is not a diagnostic composite assembled from them. It is the selection environment.

Give ambition, insecurity, acquisition, certainty and dominance repeated advantages in contests for status and they do not need to conspire. The structure performs the sorting. Something can be ruinous to the whole while remaining exquisitely adapted to the local conditions selecting it. Padilla, Hogan and Kaiser (2007) describe destructive leadership through the interaction of leaders, followers and conducive environments. The wider principle is more disturbing: systems can reward the characteristics that damage them, and become increasingly good at doing so.

Selection also changes the conditions doing the selecting. A sufficiently successful dickhead alters the behaviour of everyone nearby. People avoid, comply, flatter, conceal, retaliate, form alliances, keep records, stop speaking or leave. Each response is sensible enough from where the person stands. Together they construct a different environment. What began as an advantage for one occupant becomes a condition favouring similar occupants in the future. The pathology is self-propagating.

Morrison and Milliken (2000) describe organisational silence: when speaking becomes dangerous or pointless, information capable of correcting a hierarchy stops travelling through it. Hirschman’s (1970) distinction between exit and voice reveals another part of the mechanism. Those able to leave disappear from the local environment; those who remain discover which truths are survivable. The system is no longer merely selecting a person. The person and the system are selecting each other.

Maner and Mead (2010) found that dominance-motivated leaders facing unstable hierarchy could protect their positions by withholding information and excluding highly capable group members. Competence becomes threatening precisely where competence is most needed. Suppressing it also suppresses the feedback by which stupidity might be discovered. The institution can remain operational while becoming progressively less capable of examining its own assumptions, a condition Alvesson and Spicer (2012) describe through functional stupidity.

Even resistance can become part of the machinery. The tyrant acquires rebels, the gatekeeper supplicants, the provocateur outrage, the petty official an endless procession of people against whom the magnificence of the rule can be demonstrated. Conflict does not necessarily break a relation; sometimes it keeps that relation alive (Simmel, 1904; Coser, 1956). Eventually nobody needs to design the pathology. Memory has migrated into procedure, expectation, silence, dependency and habit. The individual can leave. The vacancy remembers him.

Dickheadedness is consequently more useful as an attractor than as a personality type. Different people converge upon recognisably similar behaviour when surrounding conditions make it effective, while the same person may behave differently when those conditions change. An attractor is not a predetermined destination. It describes a pattern towards which a system repeatedly tends. Each successful performance changes the probabilities of subsequent performances, and the resulting organisation can persist through the replacement of its participants.

Resource dependence amplifies the effect because controlling what others require weakens the corrective feedback arriving from below (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978). Insecurity seeks status; status enables acquisition; acquisition enlarges control; control filters information; filtered information protects the arrangement that produced it. The sequence need not begin at any particular point. Its components reinforce one another, reproducing both the behaviour and the conditions under which that behaviour succeeds.

Reflective intelligence can face a structural disadvantage. It entertains uncertainty, competing interests, self-correction and the possibility of being wrong. It hesitates where ambition advertises certainty, revises where status rewards consistency, and notices costs that acquisition can classify as somebody else’s problem. These are not universal properties of intelligent or ambitious people. They are consequences of particular selection arrangements, and those arrangements are neither inevitable nor permanent.

For much of human history, people could look aghast at some wealthy fool, vicious king or insulated court and wait for death, revolt, bankruptcy or distance to finish the episode. The pattern was terrible, but much of its damage could still be pushed outward, downward or forward. That operating model has reached its limit.

Finance, extraction, computation, media, weapons, logistics and environmental transformation now give local pathologies extraordinary reach while preserving astonishing distances between decision and consequence. There is less elsewhere to damage and less later in which to hide the bill. Technological acceleration can enlarge the consequences of action faster than the capacity to recognise and correct them, a problem examined in this wider argument about organisational selection and systemic consequences.

Yet the same principle that makes the problem frightening makes it tractable. Persistent organisation is not fixed organisation. Replacing a destructive occupant may be necessary, but it does not by itself change the conditions that generated the vacancy. Change what receives status, what accumulates power, what information can travel, what costs return to their source, what forms of intelligence are rewarded and what dependencies are permitted to deepen, and different futures become easier to reach. The question is not simply how to prevent bad people from acquiring authority. It is how to stop constructing arrangements in which destructive behaviour becomes a reliable route to success.

Cooperation, intelligence and care are not moral decorations for a machine whose real business is acquisition. They are operating conditions for a world that has become too connected, too powerful and too finite for organised stupidity at scale. The logic of persistence does not privilege wisdom over stupidity. Both can reproduce themselves when the conditions permit. What matters is which possibilities we continue to cultivate.

The dickhead was never quite the point. The question is what we keep making possible, and whether we can learn to make something wiser before there is nowhere left for the consequences to go.

References

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