Why Kimberley Breevaart reads and writes about difficult subjects

While the sun is shining outside, Kimberley Breevaart is in the Pavilion talking about the darker sides of people, about the book Sociopath, a Memoir by Patric Gagne – more on that later – and about tyrannical leadership, the subject she has been studying for a decade. For her research, she listens to the stories of people who have routinely had to deal with verbally or non-verbally aggressive managers in a variety of sectors, and people who have been bullied, ridiculed or humiliated in front of others in the workplace.

Breevaart talks, reads and writes about this subject at EUR. “Even at universities, employees have to deal with psychological abuse from managers”, she says, based on knowledge gleaned from the many stories she has heard.

Since writing an article in 2020 about how difficult it is to raise the issue of a manager’s destructive behaviour, she has been receiving emails from people sharing their experiences. Some of these emails have come from colleagues in the academic community. “I regularly check in with myself to make sure I’m still okay with being so intensely involved in this subject. If nothing has changed in twenty years’ time, I can imagine myself doing something else – but right now I feel fighting fit. If nobody does anything, nothing is ever going to change.”

Breevaart started researching this subject a decade ago. She chose it precisely because few scholars were looking into ‘the dark sides of leadership’. “We mostly knew the effects of positive leadership, but the effects of poor leadership were less well known”, she reflects.

Social safety was not yet a social issue. Matthijs van Nieuwkerk was still thriving as host of the television programme De Wereld Draait Door (The world keeps on turning). “These days, I can cite Van Nieuwkerk as an example when I talk about tyrannical leadership, but at the time we had no known examples in the Netherlands.”

In her early years studying this subject, there was a court case in France against France Télécom, the predecessor of telecoms provider Orange. During a reorganisation, 35 employees of the company committed or attempted suicide. A French court ruled that disproportionate moral pressure had been exerted over employees. The company’s management was held responsible, and the former CEO and several managers received prison sentences. “When it comes to tyrannical leadership, I’d like to be able to say that this telecom company is an extreme example, but now I know it’s merely run-of-the-mill”, says Breevaart.

“It happens a lot more than we think. In the ten years I’ve been conducting research, I’ve come across two people who never had an unpleasant experience with a manager. One was self-employed, the other was at the beginning of their career.” Even with the strong focus on social safety in the workplace in recent years, it is still hard to question the position of managers. “Saying anything about the most powerful people in an organisation is complicated”, Breevaart observes. There are many reasons why: people are afraid for their job and for their future, people have come to consider their destructive manager’s behaviour as normal, or they prefer to watch and wait, letting the situation continue. Speaking out is not always the best option either: “If, while talking with a confidential adviser, the employee concludes that there’s no point in raising the issue of the tyrannical behaviour, it can sometimes be better to look for another job. Ultimately, the health of the employee comes first.”

Breevaart claims her hobby of reading keeps her sane, but even the books on her bedside table deal with difficult subjects, such as discrimination, racism and sociopathy. “If you really want to change something, you have to understand where it comes from”, she explains, although sociopathy is a difficult subject to get a handle on. “You can’t change a personality disorder, but you can change the way you deal with it.”

In the book Sociopath, a Memoir, Patric Gagne writes about her own experience of being a sociopath. The writer barely feels emotions and is capable of the most terrible things – ‘prison is full of people with sociopathy’ – but self-reflection and self-examination enable her to deal with her personality.

Attending funerals is a way for Gagne to channel her tendencies. “That may be a bit strange, but it’s socially acceptable and better than, say, theft or stalking”, says Breevaart. “If you know which situations trigger bad tendencies, you can design your environment in such a way that you’re facilitated in desirable behaviour.”

The same goes for destructive leadership. For example, there is a link between narcissism and poor leadership. “You can’t change narcissism either, but you can question whether a leadership position is suitable for someone who scores high on narcissism.” Breevaart’s point is that things are not straightforward. She herself embraces complex questions, both in her work and in her spare time.