Why Do I Feel Like I'm the Crazy One Here? The Executive's Guide to California Labor Code 1102.5 and Toxic Leadership, by Judith C. Wolff, a practicing California employment attorney

I am not a psychologist, and this is not therapeutic advice. I am an attorney, but this is not legal advice, either. This article is based on my own observations from representing hundreds of California employees, academic reading on personality disorders --and some painful experience along the way. None of this is a substitute for advice from a lawyer who knows the specific facts of your situation. But if you're dealing with a narcissistic executive who has started treating your legitimate compliance concerns as personal betrayal, understanding both the psychology and the law can help you decide what to document, what to say, and when to call someone. While this article focuses on California, most states have whistleblower protection laws.

A significant percentage of people who contact me for legal representation talk about feeling sick because of work. They describe heightened anxiety at the thought of walking back into the office or logging on Monday morning. Sometimes they've recently started seeing a therapist for the first time in years. They talk about changes in sleep and weight, and a general sense of dread.

Sometimes that dread is justified. They may have missed significant deadlines, or may not be performing up to standard. Or there's a layoff looming and they're likely to be included in it. In those situations, there often isn't much I can do.

But sometimes — not infrequently, particularly among my managerial and C-suite clients — there is nothing significantly amiss with their performance. They may be performing at or above expectations by every objective measure. What they've actually done is run afoul of a supervisor — oftentimes in the C-suite — who displays one or more traits from what's loosely known as "Cluster B" personality patterns, a category defined in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and characterized by dramatic, overly emotional, erratic, or unpredictable patterns of thinking and behavior.

Defining Cluster B Personality Types

Cluster B personalities can be unbelievably charismatic — passionate, intensely brilliant leaders with a way of taking over the energy in a room. They can appear to mirror your interests, enthusiasms, and fears, which generates a strong empathetic response from people who are themselves high in empathy. They think you’re the most wonderful, smartest person in the world who will save this company from ruin  –until they don’t. They tend to be more risk-tolerant than the average person, which can make them look fearless when leading a group of cautious employees into uncharted territory –until they take the company towards the brink of ruin.

The four basic Cluster B types are:

• Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD): a pervasive disregard for the rights, safety, and feelings of others. Individuals may violate societal rules, act aggressively, and show no remorse. They typically don’t show up in the C-suite because they typically lack any interest in charming.

• Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD): intense, unstable emotions, a distorted self-image, and chronic feelings of emptiness, often paired with an intense fear of abandonment and impulsive behavior.

• Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD): an overwhelming desire to be noticed, expressed through dramatic, attention-seeking behavior, rapidly shifting and shallow emotions, and high suggestibility.

• Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD): a deep-seated need for admiration, a lack of empathy for others, and an inflated sense of self-importance.

These aren't rigid categories — personality types overlap and share traits with one another. For example, all four types tend to be risk-tolerant. Narcissistic types often blend the disregard for others' rights found in antisocial personalities with the preening, attention-seeking quality of histrionic personalities.

In my own practice, the C-suite executives who cause the most pain in the workplace — and generate the greatest legal exposure for employers down the road — tend to be the fourth type, particularly those who are malignantly narcissistic. Research published by the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance indicates that upwards of 18% of CEOs possess moderate-to-high narcissistic traits — roughly three times the general population average of 5%. A widely cited study by Bond University found that 21% of examined CEOs displayed clinically significant psychopathic traits.

The chances are that your company's CEO didn't get to the top through merit alone; chances are good they're also fairly manipulative. That isn't necessarily a bad thing — history is full of malignant narcissists who accomplished great things despite their proclivities. But if you have regular dealings with a difficult C-suite leader, it's worth understanding what you're dealing with and adjusting accordingly, whether you plan to stay or to leave.

The Narcissistic Leader's Impact on the Workplace

Psychologists generally sort corporate narcissists into two types: grandiose (loud, charming, highly visible) and vulnerable or covert (hypersensitive, defensive, quietly manipulative). Narcissistic leaders typically combine high-stakes vision with severe interpersonal dysfunction. They get promoted through a mix of vision, relentless self-promotion, charm, drive, and fearlessness. That same drive can push a company to spectacular heights in the short term — but the underlying need for admiration and lack of empathy tends to create a volatile, unsustainable environment that, over time, ends in litigation.

The Corporate Fallout

Some narcissistic CEOs deliver real short-term results. But the research on their long-term impact is not kind:

• Brain drain: the strongest, most self-respecting employees tend to leave first, leaving a weakened bench behind.

• Litigation and scandal: disregard for rules and appetite for risk significantly raises a company's exposure to fraud claims, lawsuits, and PR disasters.

• A culture of fear: innovation stalls because employees become too wary of volatile outbursts or professional retaliation to raise new ideas or flag real problems.

  
  

Tangling with a Narcissist (or other Cluster B-Type)

Above all, narcissists resent having their judgment questioned. Questions register as insubordination, which tends to trigger retaliation. Narcissists expect employees to align entirely with their version of reality even when the facts or the numbers say otherwise, and they tend to surround themselves with people who will tell them what they want to hear. Dissent, constructive feedback, or objective data get read as personal attacks or disloyalty. When a project fails, they will often rewrite the history of it — convincing the team that the failure was theirs, not a result of the leader's own flawed direction.

Behaviors to watch for:

• Erratically shifting priorities

• Changing goalposts

• Reorganizing the company in a way that feels reactive rather than necessary

• Insisting that what they told you to do is not what they told you to do

• Triangulating employees — anointing a current favorite and a current scapegoat, then watching them work it out

• Micromanaging in a way that signals distrust rather than genuine interest in the outcome

• Suddenly looping other people into email threads

• Telling you how well someone else in the company is doing (another form of triangulation)

• Mentioning, unprompted, who in the company doesn't like you

• "You're my favorite" talk that quietly turns into indifference

• Laying off people around you

• Excluding you from meetings or social events

• Sudden drop in performance review rating

• Using HR to manufacture an official record where none was needed

• Expressing deep personal disappointment, as though you'd let them down individually

  
  

How to Protect Yourself From Retaliation

A lot has already been written about how to get along with Cluster B types. My focus here is protection rather than harmony, but two of the standard techniques for staying under the radar are worth a quick recap.

1. Master the "Grey Rock" Method

Narcissistic leaders feed on emotional reactions, positive or negative. The Grey Rock strategy means making yourself as unremarkable as a plain grey rock:

• Remove emotion: keep your voice flat and neutral when they try to provoke you or when they're bragging.

  
  

• Stick to data: answer in short, factual, strictly professional terms.

  
  

• Limit small talk: don't share personal details — they can become leverage or a boundary that gets crossed later. Any personal opinion expressed to a narcissist is likely to come back at you later in a moment of anger.

  
  

2. Practice "Tactical Flattery" (Feed the Ego Safely)

You don't need to become a sycophant, but openly contradicting a narcissist paints a target on your back. Strategic phrasing gets you further:

• Frame ideas as theirs: "Building on your point from last week, I structured the project this way."

  
  

• Give public credit: if a project succeeds, publicly acknowledge their "vision" or "leadership." It satisfies the need for admiration and keeps you in the in-group.

  
  

• Validate before pivoting: "That's a very bold vision. To make sure the team can execute it perfectly, should we look at the timeline?"

  
  

Legal Protections

If you've read this far, chances are you've already triggered a narcissist's anger and you're looking for ways to either avoid getting fired, or for recourse if it happens. Here's the truest — and riskiest — thing I can tell you: narcissistic bosses routinely break rules. This is true in their personal lives as well as their professional lives. Rule-breaking is closer to a personality feature than a choice. Narcissists (and the broader Cluster B cluster) tend toward grandiosity and a belief that ordinary constraints don't apply to them. That's not incidental to the retaliation risk — it's why the underlying violations tend to exist in the first place, and why they keep recurring even after being flagged. A garden-variety manager who breaks a regulation once and gets told about it usually corrects course. A cluster B manager experiences the correction itself as an attack, which is what escalates a single compliance issue into an ongoing pattern worth litigating. The narcissist’s need for admiration makes disclosures feel like betrayal rather than business.

This is exactly where whistleblower retaliation claims arise. If part of your job involves responsibility for compliance with laws that could expose the company to civil or criminal liability, one way to protect yourself from that anger you will stir up is by by putting  potential and actual violations on the record with the people responsible for investigating them — and to do it deliberately, not just in passing conversation. If this seems counter-intuitive, to some extent it is. Calling out a Cluster B boss for any infraction is risky, but if you have to do it, do it carefully.

Putting something "on the record" is about what a neutral third party or a court would later be able to see. It doesn't require confrontation.

• Route it through a channel, not a personality clash. A memo to compliance, HR, the board, or even a written email to the CEO framed as "flagging this for the record so we're covered" reads as diligence, not defiance — especially if you use language that assumes good faith ("I know we'll want to get ahead of this before it becomes a bigger issue"). Narcissists often respond better to concerns framed as protecting him or the company's reputation than framed as him being wrong.

  
  

• Written channels do double duty. An email is both less confrontational in the moment (no live reaction to manage) and better evidence than a verbal conversation. You're not choosing between safety and documentation — email is often the safer way to raise it.

  
  

• Timing and specificity matter more than tone. § 1102.5 doesn't require you to have been combative or self-righteous about it. It just requires that you disclosed information you reasonably believed showed a violation, to someone with authority to act on it. A calm, low-key, "just so this is on our radar" email checks that box as well as a dramatic confrontation would — better, actually, since drama is exactly what triggers retaliation.

  
  
  
  

Strategic thinking: whistleblowers with a reasonable belief are protected from retaliatory termination. California Labor Code § 1102.5(b) protects an employee who discloses information to someone with authority over them — or to a government or law enforcement agency — where the employee has reasonable cause to believe the information shows a violation of a federal, state, or local statute or regulation. To win a claim, you need to show three things: protected activity (the disclosure), an adverse employment action, and a causal link between the two.

That causal link is more employee-friendly than most people assume. Since Lawson v. PPG Architectural Finishes (2022), California no longer applies the traditional McDonnell Douglas burden-shifting test to these claims. Instead, under § 1102.6, you only need to show that your protected disclosure was a contributing factor in the adverse action — not the sole reason, not even the main one. Once you clear that bar, the burden shifts to the employer, who then has to prove by clear and convincing evidence that it would have taken the same action anyway, for legitimate, independent reasons. That's a considerably heavier lift for an employer than the pretext standard under federal law, and it's worth knowing going in.

A few practical steps make a real difference if a claim ever becomes necessary:

• Document each disclosure separately — the date, who received it, how it was made (email, verbal in a meeting, a memo to the board), and the specific law or regulation at issue. The statute protects you even if you turn out to be wrong, as long as your belief was reasonable — but the more specific you are, the harder it is for anyone to later characterize it as vague griping.

  
  

• If a disclosure was made verbally, send yourself a timestamped, contemporaneous email describing what was said and to whom. Courts give far more weight to documentation made in the moment than to a reconstruction after the fact.

  
  

• Keep an informal timeline of hostility or retaliatory behavior mapped against your disclosure dates. You want the record to show the adverse action following the disclosure.

  
  

• For strategy, the time to call an attorney is before you get fired.

  
  

Remember the 90-day presumption. If a termination — or any of a list of other adverse actions, including a pay cut or demotion — happens within 90 days of a protected disclosure, § 1102.5(f) creates a rebuttable presumption that it was retaliatory. The burden then shifts to the employer to prove otherwise. If you sense termination coming, resist any pressure toward resigning or accepting a "mutual separation" before speaking with an employment attorney. A successful § 1102.5 claim can recover back pay, front pay, and emotional distress damages. Critically, § 1102.5(j) makes attorney's fees mandatory for a prevailing employee — with no matching fee-shifting risk if you lose, unlike some other California employment claims. Punitive damages are also available where there's evidence of malice or oppression, which a documented pattern of hostility from a CEO can sometimes support. An employer with trained employment counsel is aware of those risks and is likely to take steps to avoid a lawsuit from being filed.

Last thoughts:  If you are the target of toxic leadership, consider filing a thoughtful, detailed, fact-specific complaint with HR before it goes any further. While filing a complaint will not stop all employers from terminating an employee, it usually triggers an investigation that is perhaps the most likely way to identify patterns of abuse among leadership. And it creates a paper trail for the future.

Note: The personality types described in this article are clinical categories, not labels to pin on your boss. Nothing here is a diagnosis — that requires a licensed clinician's direct evaluation.