Despite a world-class talent for entrepreneurship, Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs parked in the disabled parking spots, displayed low empathy and antisocial behavior and bullied his employees. He eventually got fired from his own company. Twitter owner and Tesla co-founder Elon Musk was combative with investors, the media, employees, and his social media audience.

Many widely celebrated character traits in CEOs, such as risk-taking and courage, often coexist with psychopathic tendencies, according to Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, author and chief talent scientist at ManpowerGroup. A professor of business psychology at Columbia University and associate at Harvard’s Entrepreneurial Finance Lab, Chamorro-Premuzic, wrote the book, “Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?”

Chamorro-Premuzic cited a 2010 study that found at least three times as many psychopaths in executive or CEO roles than in the population at large. However, more recent data found it’s now a much higher figure: 20 percent, he wrote in an April 2019 CNBC column.

Simon Croom, a professor and researcher in the master’s in supply chain management program at the University of San Diego School of Business, wrote for Fortune in 2021 that he and his colleagues found that 12 percent of corporate senior leaders display a range of psychopathic traits.

This “means psychopathy is up to 12 times more common among senior management than among the general population,” Croom wrote. That’s in line with the 15 percent rate of psychopathy found in prisons.

Some of the defining traits of psychopathy include egocentricity, predatoriness, recklessness, a lack of empathy, and a propensity for manipulation and exploitation, Croom added. They also can simultaneously have a lot of charisma and creativity while lacking socially important qualities.

Here’s how to spot a psychopath, according to Chamorro-Premuzic: 1. They often crave validation and recognition from others because their self-esteem, while high, is also fragile. Bosses who constantly show off are probably desperate for others’ admiration. 2. They tend to be self-centered, meaning empathy-deficient and generally less interested in others, rarely showing genuine consideration for people other than themselves. 3. They have high levels of entitlement, behaving as if they deserve certain privileges or enjoy higher status than their peers.

Our culture glorifies and rewards successful leaders who may be somewhere on the psychopathy spectrum, if not out-and-out psychopathic, Croom wrote.

“We found that organizations committed to CSR (corporate social responsibility) exhibit higher operational performance. Unfortunately, since one of the defining characteristics of psychopathy is a lack of empathy, it should come as no surprise that when corporate psychopathy is present within senior leadership, an organization is less likely to demonstrate CSR,” Croom wrote. 

Noticing psychopathic tendencies in senior executives isn’t new for researchers, customer relationship management consultant Gene Marks wrote for the Washington Post.

 In their groundbreaking 2006 book “Snakes in Suits,” Paul Babiak and Robert Hare were among the first to try and quantify corporate psychopaths in the C-suite. They estimated the rate to be 3.9 percent, according to Jack McCullough, author of the 2021 book, “The Psychopathic CEO, an Executive Survival Guide.”

Marks cited a psychologist who warned in 2013 of a growing number of leaders in the workplace who combine three types of dysfunctional personalities among white-collar workers: psychopath, Machiavellian, and narcissist. Such people “have a dangerous, yet effective mix of a lack of empathy, self-centeredness, deviousness and self-regard which can propel them to the top of the organizations,” the psychologist warned.

Psychopaths or people with psychopathic traits thrive in chaos and know that others don’t, “so they will often create chaos at work for this reason,” said Tara Swart, a neuroscientist and faculty member at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “They don’t care that they are hurting you. They will do what they have to do.”

READ MORE: Washington DC: Money, Politics And Power Converge Like A ‘Honey Magnet’ For Psychopaths