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Paul Lawrence

Professor, Harvard Business School

Paul R. Lawrence is a Professor Emeritus of Harvard Business School, where he served nine years as chairman of the Organizational Behavior area and also as chairman of both the MBA and AMP programs. His research, published in 25 books and numerous articles, has dealt with the human aspects of management, organizational change, organization design, human nature, and leadership. His 1967 book, Organization and Environment (written with Professor Jay Lorsch), added "contingency theory" to the vocabulary of students of organizational behavior. Recently he has, with others, made a comparative study of Soviet management practices that was published in 1990 as Behind the Factory Walls: Decision Making in Soviet and U.S. Enterprises.


People without a conscience don’t need to satisfy the drive to bond and can focus entirely on the drive to acquire, making them more likely to seek leadership positions.   Well the question becomes you know, do these people without conscience, let’s call them PWOC’s is a rather shorthand way for that.  Talking about them getting into leadership positions and they probably get into them out of all proportion to a percentage often population, we estimate they maybe 2% to 4% of the population are such people.  And we think they get into the leadership positions maybe 8% or 10% of the time, but you know, any percent is a mess because they can wreak havoc in exploiting other people.  They probably get there more than others because it’s the only thing they’re looking for in life. You know we got normal people ha