A Theory of Dickheads

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. This suggests that personality, while real, is not where the interesting problem ends. 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) show the elementary form of this in spirals of workplace incivility, where 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 possibility. The dickhead is still a person, unfortunately. But the more consequential thing is the shape waiting for someone to occupy it.

The 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 itself 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 because 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 the 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 a repeated advantage in contests for status and they do not need to conspire. The structure performs the sorting. Something can then be ruinous to the whole while remaining exquisitely adapted to the local conditions selecting it. Padilla, Hogan and Kaiser (2007) describe destructive leadership as a conjunction 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.

Then selection begins to alter the thing doing the selecting. A sufficiently successful dickhead changes 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. Morrison and Milliken (2000) call one familiar result organisational silence: when speaking becomes dangerous or pointless, information capable of correcting the hierarchy simply stops travelling through it. Hirschman’s (1970) exit and voice describe another part of the same movement. Those able to leave disappear from the local ecology; 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 position by withholding information and excluding highly capable group members. This is where the mechanism turns nasty. Competence becomes threatening precisely where competence is most needed, and suppressing competence also suppresses the feedback by which stupidity might be discovered. 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 the relation; sometimes it keeps the 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.

This is why dickheadedness is more useful as an attractor than as a personality type. Different people converge upon recognisably similar behaviour when the surrounding relations make that behaviour effective, while the same person can change when those relations change. Each successful performance slightly rearranges what becomes easier next. Resource dependence amplifies the effect because controlling what others need weakens the corrective feedback arriving from below (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978). Over time, selection and power can begin pointing in the same direction: insecurity seeks status; status enables acquisition; acquisition enlarges control; control filters information; filtered information protects the arrangement that produced it. Reflective intelligence has a structural disadvantage here. 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. For most 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. Yet the same principle that makes the problem frightening makes it tractable. Persistent organisation is not fixed organisation. 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. 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 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

Alvesson, M. and Spicer, A. (2012). A stupidity-based theory of organizations. Journal of Management Studies, 49(7), 1194-1220.

Introduces “functional stupidity”: organisations can restrict reflexivity, justification and substantive reasoning while continuing to operate effectively. The useful sting is that stupidity need not make an institution fail; under the right conditions, suppressing doubt can help it cohere.

Andersson, L. M. and Pearson, C. M. (1999). Tit for tat? The spiraling effect of incivility in the workplace. Academy of Management Review, 24(3), 452-471.

Models workplace incivility as reciprocal escalation, where small violations alter the probability of subsequent ones. Behaviour does not merely occur inside a social environment; it helps construct the environment encountered by whoever acts next.

Brunell, A. B., Gentry, W. A., Campbell, W. K., Hoffman, B. J., Kuhnert, K. W. and DeMarree, K. G. (2008). Leader emergence: The case of the narcissistic leader. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(12), 1663-1676.

Examines the relationship between narcissism and leadership emergence in initially leaderless groups. The important distinction is brutally simple: being selected as a leader and being good at leading are different problems, and social systems need not solve both equally well.

Coser, L. A. (1956). The Functions of Social Conflict. Free Press.

Coser develops the proposition that conflict can strengthen boundaries, identities and internal cohesion rather than simply damage social organisation. Antagonism can reproduce the very relationship it appears to oppose, which helps explain why provocateurs, gatekeepers and enemies can become remarkably durable social functions.

Durkheim, E. (1982/1895). The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method. Edited with an introduction by S. Lukes; translated by W. D. Halls. New York: Free Press. (Original work published 1895.)

Durkheim’s treatment of social facts, including his analysis of crime as a normal social phenomenon, separates social function from moral approval. That distinction matters here: behaviour can be objectionable or destructive at one scale while still participating in the reproduction of organisation at another.

Fast, N. J., Sivanathan, N., Mayer, N. D. and Galinsky, A. D. (2012). Power and overconfident decision-making. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 117(2), 249-260.

Experimental work connecting the subjective experience of power with increased overconfidence in decision-making. More power does not automatically produce more epistemic caution. It can produce less.

G. (2026a). The Structural Risk of Technological Acceleration: Why Delay, Feedback, and Time Still Govern Complex Systems. Daedelus Kite.
[The Structural Risk of Technological Acceleration]

Treats delay not as friction to be engineered away but as part of the temporal architecture through which feedback, memory, recognition and coherent response become possible. Here it supplies a quieter counterpoint to power: systems that accelerate action while compressing the interval for correction can become increasingly capable of propagating consequences at precisely the rate at which they become less able to recognise what they are doing.

G. (2026b). Applied Field Logic: From Field-Level Principles to Domain-Level Practice. Daedelus Kite.
[Applied Field Logic: From Field-Level Principles to Domain-Level Practice]

Moves between local appearances and recurrent relational organisation, treating participants and events as domain-level expressions of structures that can persist across changing occupants and contexts. Its resonance here is deliberately oblique: the dickhead remains locally real, but changing observational resolution reveals why replacing the visible component may leave the generative shape untouched, while small changes to relations can alter what the whole field subsequently makes possible.

Härtel, T. M., Leckelt, M., Grosz, M. P., Küfner, A. C. P., Geukes, K. and Back, M. D. (2023). Pathways from narcissism to leadership emergence in social groups. European Journal of Personality, 37(1), 72-94. DOI: 10.1177/08902070211046266.

Dissects the pathways through which narcissistic characteristics can contribute to leadership emergence, particularly through socially legible dominant and assertive behaviour. The selection problem follows: what groups readily recognise as leadership helps determine who reaches positions from which leadership is later exercised.

Hirschman, A. O. (1970). Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Harvard University Press.

Hirschman distinguishes leaving a deteriorating organisation from remaining and attempting to change it through voice, with loyalty altering the choice between them. The deeper implication is selective: dysfunctional systems do not merely shape those who stay; they can progressively lose precisely those participants most willing or able to refuse their terms.

Holling, C. S. (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1-23.

Holling distinguishes resilience from simple stability and redirects attention toward the persistence of relationships within systems undergoing disturbance. Persistence is not evidence of health, efficiency or virtue. Bad systems can be resilient too.

Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H. and Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological Review, 110(2), 265-284.

Proposes that elevated power activates approach-related tendencies while reduced power increases inhibition, vigilance and sensitivity to threat and constraint. Power changes not only what someone can do, but what they notice, discount and imagine themselves able to do next.

Krekels, G. and Pandelaere, M. (2015). Dispositional greed. Personality and Individual Differences, 74, 225-230.

Defines dispositional greed around insatiability and develops and validates a measure of the construct, distinguishing it from neighbouring concepts such as materialism. This matters because acquisition need not terminate when need is satisfied; greed can organise desire around wanting more rather than around any particular object finally obtained.

Levin, S. A. (1998). Ecosystems and the biosphere as complex adaptive systems. Ecosystems, 1(5), 431-436.

Treats ecological organisation through interacting adaptive components, cross-scale dynamics, diversity and emergent pattern rather than central control. Architecturally, this is the shift the essay needs: stop asking only what is wrong with one component and ask what recurrent interactions keep generating the pattern.

Liu, Z., Sun, X., Ding, X., Hu, X., Xu, Z. and Fu, Z. (2019). Psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the Dispositional Greed Scale and a portrait of greedy people. Personality and Individual Differences, 137, 101-109.

Extends empirical work on dispositional greed and examines its associations with a wider cluster of psychological and socioeconomic variables. The important object here is not a cartoon villain but a conjunction: insecurity, comparison, distrust and zero-sum interpretation can make further acquisition feel less like excess than defence.

Maner, J. K. and Mead, N. L. (2010). The essential tension between leadership and power: When leaders sacrifice group goals for the sake of self-interest. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(3), 482-497.

Across five experiments, leaders high in dominance motivation responded to unstable hierarchy by protecting their own power, including withholding information and excluding highly capable group members. Here the loop becomes visible: insecurity at the top can turn competence below into a threat, and suppressing that competence makes the hierarchy progressively worse at correcting the conditions that produced the insecurity.

Morrison, E. W. and Milliken, F. J. (2000). Organizational silence: A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world. Academy of Management Review, 25(4), 706-725.

Explains how shared beliefs that speaking up is dangerous or pointless can produce organisation-wide silence about important problems. Once correction becomes costly, silence stops being evidence of success. It may be evidence that the feedback system has been disabled.

Nicolis, G. and Prigogine, I. (1977). Self-Organization in Nonequilibrium Systems: From Dissipative Structures to Order Through Fluctuations. Wiley.

A foundational treatment of how organised macroscopic structure can arise and persist in open systems far from equilibrium. The borrowing is structural, not metaphorical proof: enduring form need not require fixed components, which makes persistence through replacement intelligible as an organisational phenomenon.

Padilla, A., Hogan, R. and Kaiser, R. B. (2007). The toxic triangle: Destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(3), 176-194.

Locates destructive leadership in the conjunction of leader characteristics, susceptible followers and conducive environments rather than inside the leader alone. Remove one destructive occupant without changing the relations that made the position viable and the generating conditions remain.

Pfeffer, J. and Salancik, G. R. (1978). The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective. Harper & Row.

Shows how organisations and actors are constrained by dependencies on resources controlled elsewhere, making power inseparable from relational asymmetry. A dickhead controlling something others require inhabits a radically different feedback environment from one who must absorb the consequences of every action.

Simmel, G. (1904). The sociology of conflict. I. American Journal of Sociology, 9(4), 490-525. DOI: 10.1086/211234.

Simmel treats conflict as a form of social interaction capable of binding opponents into an enduring relation. The paradox matters: enemies can become mutually constitutive, so opposition may sustain a social configuration rather than dissolve it.

Sutton, R. I. (2007). The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. Business Plus.

Documents the interpersonal and organisational costs generated by persistently demeaning, abusive and corrosive workplace behaviour, while arguing for institutional responses rather than passive tolerance. Sutton supplies the deliberately ordinary starting point; the harder question begins when the offending individual disappears and, somehow, the dickhead comes back.