I meet quite a few managers who look at the 'insider threat' only through the prism of information theft, industrial espionage or financial fraud. But there is another kind of insider threat, far quieter, that usually does not appear in security reports.
The abuser.
That manager who belittles employees, humiliates them in front of others, instills fear, erodes them psychologically, creates anxiety and dismantles self-confidence over time.
Studies have already shown that workplace abuse does not stay on the emotional level alone. It harms cognitive ability, decision-making, memory, concentration and professional functioning. An employee under ongoing psychological terror begins to make more mistakes, to withdraw, to lose motivation and sometimes even to develop anger toward the organization itself.
And this is exactly where the connection to the world of insider threats begins.
Because sometimes the 'predator' himself is the insider threat. And sometimes he creates a new insider threat: the employee he has harmed.
An employee who experiences ongoing humiliation can turn into a bitter, indifferent, vengeful or uncommitted person. In certain cases this manifests as quiet quitting, leakage of information, harm to processes, or simply a functional collapse that damages the organization from within.
This is exactly why I think it is not enough to check only the integrity, past or reliability of candidates. You also need to know how to identify predatory patterns.
Yes, there are ways to identify them. You can detect early signs already at the recruitment stage: extreme patterns of control, manipulativeness, lack of empathy, destructive interpersonal relations over time, recurring burnout patterns in the teams they have managed, and a work environment that produces fear instead of trust.
And if that person is already inside the organization, you must monitor such behaviors exactly as you monitor other security anomalies. Because their damage does not always appear immediately, but when it explodes, the organizational cost is enormous.
I think that in the near future organizations will understand that workplace abuse is not only an issue of HR or employee well-being. It is an issue of organizational security.