Workplace mental health and the market for lay labels
How popular psychology turns organisational failure into workplace suspicion
The other day I came across a book that could also be bought at a professional event connected to workplace mental health and HR. The title does its job immediately. Anyone who has ever worked inside an organisation can probably attach it to a particular boss, colleague, HR figure, or old workplace story.
As a market move, it works. Professionally, it is much more troubling.
A book of this kind takes a concept with clinical and forensic origins, turns it into workplace survival advice, and then leaves the reader to decide whether the pattern fits their own boss, colleague, or HR partner. The cover, title, and examples say: look around, you may already know who this is. The internal warnings about caution arrive later, and they carry less force than the promise itself.
The route by which the material reaches people is secondary. It may be a book, a talk, a workshop, a conference recommendation, or a professional conversation. The same mechanism is at work: a lay audience receives a category that can be applied to its own workplace relationships. The issue is not reading as a form of information-gathering. The issue is labelling, indicated here by a popular psychology product.
In a workplace mental health setting, this kind of material gains professional cover. The participant encounters it in a programme where people are talking about HR, wellbeing, leadership, boundaries, stress, and organisational responsibility. Something they can buy or hear in that setting may easily be treated as part of responsible workplace thinking.
The employee in this situation is a lay user. They work with partial information. They see a few meetings, read a few emails, hear stories from others, and carry their own experience. They do not have access to every decision paper, they do not see the leadership conversations, they do not know every version of the story, and they are usually not in a protected investigative position. They do have a boss, a performance review, an internal reputation, financial dependence, previous grievances, and a few events that can now be arranged under a new category.
This is where the popular psychology market promises more than the material can professionally support. The product serves a desire for identification while borrowing the language of responsibility. It may include warnings about caution, but the use situation barely changes. The participant receives a concept, a few memorable signs, and an interpretive frame that can easily be placed onto specific people.
Books of this kind may have some limited observational value. They can direct attention to the fact that workplace harm often appears outside open conflict. It may appear when someone builds reputation from other people’s work, shifts responsibility downwards, withholds information, presents a tidy picture in formal forums, behaves differently in smaller settings, and the person who raises a concern then finds their own position damaged. These patterns can be examined at organisational level. The problem arises when the participant receives a personality category in place of a procedure.
Caponecchia, Sun, and Wyatt studied how 307 Australian employees applied psychopathy-related labels and behavioural criteria to colleagues. The study found that lay employees may apply the psychopathy label and its criteria to colleagues at a rate that exceeds scientific prevalence estimates. The authors point to the risk of misclassification and stigma even in cases where the starting point was genuinely unacceptable workplace behaviour (Caponecchia, Sun, & Wyatt, 2012).
That study does not prove that every book or talk of this kind causes measurable harm. There is no good estimate of the size of the risk. We do not know exactly how often lay labelling leads to harm, how often it remains a harmless reader impression, or how often it helps someone notice a genuinely damaging pattern. The article’s claim is narrower: the use situation carries a labelling risk that HR and workplace mental health settings need to take seriously.
Harmful workplace behaviour exists. Some leaders and colleagues use other people’s work to build their own reputation, shift responsibility downwards, collect and redeploy information, present different faces to different audiences, and over time cause significant damage to people, teams, and decisions. These patterns need to be seen. Workplace handling requires precise language, multi-source inquiry, and procedure.
A lay label gives a final explanation too early. A leader presents other people’s prepared material as their own result across three projects. After a complaint, the complainant’s reputation deteriorates. After a decision failure, responsibility moves downwards. A detail from an informal conversation later appears in another context. These may indicate a behavioural pattern. They may indicate an organisational risk. They may point to poor leadership, political manoeuvring, weak controls, abusive practice, or undocumented decision discipline. A personality label pulls these possibilities towards one internal explanation.
Professional assessment is a different operation. The PCL-R, used in psychopathy assessment, is a twenty-item instrument used in clinical, research, and forensic contexts, together with a semi-structured interview, file material, and external information. This kind of assessment requires training, access to information, evaluative responsibility, and the right application context. A workplace participant works from partial experience. They sense behaviour, hear stories, and see power relations, but they do not have the data and procedural conditions required for a professional assessment.
Smith and Lilienfeld point in the same direction. Their review argues that media and professional attention around workplace psychopathy has moved ahead of stable empirical evidence. The phenomenon can be studied, and destructive workplace behaviour exists, but the popular explanatory frame often spreads faster than the method needed for responsible use (Smith & Lilienfeld, 2013).
At this point, two genres need to be separated. Lay psychoeducation can have a place in workplace mental health. Well-designed programmes can help leaders notice overload, help employees know where to turn, reduce stigma, and support earlier intervention. That is a different genre from putting a clinical-forensic category into circulation as a language for identifying dangerous people at work. Responsible mental health literacy teaches help-seeking, support, early signalling, leadership response, and organisational risk management. A person-hunting logic directs attention elsewhere.
This is especially sensitive in an HR setting linked to mental health. Workplace mental health is an organisational responsibility: assessing psychosocial risks, examining leadership behaviour, handling complaints, protecting people from retaliation, running documented procedures, and involving external expertise where needed. A book promising recognition of dangerous personality types is a cheap and visible substitute. It is easy to consume. It has a good title. It gives an immediate explanation. It does not do the organisational work.
For an employee in a subordinate position, labelling language carries a particular risk. Once spoken, it can turn back on the speaker. The organisation may hear the label before it hears the events behind it. A diagnostic-sounding label is immediately open to attack. A behaviour-based report is more examinable: who did what, when, in which decision situation, on whose information, with what consequence, where it was recorded, and how it repeated.
That does not provide automatic protection. In a closed, punitive, or loyalty-driven organisational culture, even a carefully documented report can be risky. The risk is handled through reporting channels, anti-retaliation protection, leadership response, HR procedure, and legal-organisational control. The advantage of behaviour-based language is narrower: it makes the issue more examinable because it ties the report to an event, a decision, a document, and a consequence. Protection has to come from the procedure.
Research on employee voice and silence has long shown that employees weigh up who they can tell, what the consequences may be, whether their position will be damaged, whether they will receive support, or whether they themselves will become the carrier of the problem. Morrison’s review shows why voice and silence have become a major research area: speaking up has consequences for both individuals and organisations (Morrison, 2023). In this context, giving a clinically derived label to people in lower-power positions is a risky educational gesture. The employee receives a language with which to explain what they see. They do not receive the protected organisational position in which they can use that language without consequences.
In these cases, HR’s work is behavioural and procedural. Where an organisation sees recurring complaints, fear, turnover, responsibility-shifting, reputational attacks, information withholding, or appropriation of other people’s work, the events need examination. Who did what, when, in which decision situation, on whose information, with what consequence. Where it appeared in writing. Who received it. Who changed it. Who left it unchanged. Which decision went through in the same form. Which team saw the pattern repeat.
That examination starts from complaint handling, exit interviews, internal moves, performance reviews, sickness and turnover patterns, meeting notes, emails, project delays, customer complaints, and decision trails. In severe cases, employment law, compliance, organisational psychology, or other external expertise may be needed. HR’s role is to turn the report into an examinable event, the event into a procedure, and the procedure into consequence.
A behavioural analysis frame looks at observable movement. In what situation does the behaviour appear. In front of whom does it change. What information disappears. Whose responsibility increases. Who receives the credit. Who carries the error. Which document preserves the trace. Which decision remains unchanged after the signal. How many independent people describe a similar pattern.
This frame makes handling more precise. Manipulative, abusive, or exploitative conduct becomes an organisational issue when repetition, decision points, documents, affected people, and consequences can be seen. A label moves quickly but does little organisational work. Behavioural description moves more slowly, but it is better suited to preventing an issue from remaining a personal impression.
The behavioural patterns found in popular books and talks can be turned into usable organisational material. The diagnostic label has to be removed, and the patterns have to be translated into a behaviour-based reporting protocol. The practical question is what repeated behaviour appears, which decisions it affects, who is harmed, where the trace is, and what organisational response follows.
A responsible HR guide would provide four things. Label-free behavioural description: what to record, which event, which decision point, which document, which consequence. Multi-source inquiry: how to handle different complaints, data, exit patterns, and documents together. Protection from retaliation: whom the employee can approach, who accesses the information, what happens to the report, and how the reporting person is protected. A threshold for external expertise: when HR needs employment law, compliance, organisational psychology, or another external specialist.
The workplace mental health market offers quickly consumable psychological language for situations where employees may be experiencing harm, fear, or loss of influence. That quick language can easily become a personality label where the organisation does not run a system in which concrete behaviour can be reported and examined.
Psychological concepts in HR and workplace mental health settings acquire workplace use. They attach to people, conflicts, leaders, HR figures, and decisions. Difficult workplace behaviour patterns need to be discussed. The responsible form ties them to behaviour, evidence, procedure, and protection.
The employee needs an organisation where a concrete event can be reported, the report can be examined, retaliation can be handled, and HR does not hand over to the reader the work for which it should be running a system.
Lilien Gerlach
From a behavioural analyst’s notebook
References
Caponecchia, C., Sun, A. Y. Z., & Wyatt, A. (2012). ‘Psychopaths’ at work? Implications of lay persons’ use of labels and behavioural criteria for psychopathy. Journal of Business Ethics, 107(4), 399–408.
Morrison, E. W. (2023). Employee voice and silence: Taking stock a decade later. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 79–107.
Risk Management Authority. (2019). Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R).
Smith, S. F., & Lilienfeld, S. O. (2013). Psychopathy in the workplace: The knowns and unknowns. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 18(2), 204–218
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