HPD in the Workplace: When Your Colleague’s Need for Attention Becomes Your Problem

HISTRIONIC PERSONALITY DISORDER • April 09, 2026

LAST UPDATED: JULY 2026

Clinically reviewed by Annie Wright, LMFT

Last reviewed: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

In short: HPD in the workplace looks like a persistent pattern of attention-seeking, emotional excess, and manufactured drama that steadily pulls your colleagues’ time and focus away from the actual work.

Who I Am and Why I Know This

What Does an Unseen Performance in the Conference Room Look Like?

The fluorescent lights hummed over the polished conference table, and Susan checked her phone under the table for the third time. She’s 51, a VP of Marketing at a mid-size health tech company, the kind of person whose calendar is color-coded and whose Away carry-on lives permanently packed by her office door. Her creative director, a woman known across the building for her dramatic flair and her unpredictable moods, was late again. When she finally swept in, eleven minutes past the start time, she didn’t apologize. She launched straight into a vivid, entirely beside-the-point story about a personal crisis over the weekend, and the room’s attention bent toward her like it had no other option.

Susan felt the familiar tightening in her jaw. This wasn’t a status meeting anymore. It was a performance, and everyone at that table had become an unwitting audience member. She glanced at the clock. Forty minutes gone, and the actual agenda, the launch timeline she’d spent her weekend prepping for, hadn’t come up once.

In my work with driven women, I hear some version of Susan’s conference room constantly. The workplace is supposed to be an environment built for collaboration and results. It becomes something else entirely when a colleague or superior shows traits consistent with Histrionic Personality Disorder. This isn’t only about a need for attention. It’s a pervasive pattern that derails projects, fractures teams, and leaves genuinely competent professionals feeling wrung out by 10 a.m. on a Tuesday.

What Is Histrionic Personality Disorder in the Workplace?

Histrionic Personality Disorder doesn’t clock out when someone clocks in. The overt expressions might look different at work than they do at home, but the core mechanism is the same: an insatiable need to be the center of attention. In a professional context, that need shows up as manufactured drama, exaggerated emotional displays, and a habit of generating crises that demand everyone’s immediate focus, usually at the exact moment a deadline is closing in.

Here’s what’s important to understand, and what I try to help clients hold onto when they’re in the middle of it: this typically isn’t conscious manipulation in the way a person with more calculated antisocial traits might operate. For someone with HPD, these behaviors are usually deeply grooved patterns, closer to a desperate bid to feel seen than to a strategy. That distinction doesn’t make the impact on you or your team any less real. It just changes what kind of response actually works, which is the part we’ll get into further down.

Think of it like a smoke detector wired to go off at smoke, and also, just as loudly, at the absence of applause. A meeting that proceeds calmly, on-task, without anyone remarking on the HPD colleague’s outfit, joke, or crisis of the week, can register in that colleague’s nervous system as a kind of alarm: nobody is looking at me. Which means in practice, the pattern isn’t something that happens to you occasionally, on a bad week. It’s the ambient weather of the job. You start scheduling around it. You start drafting emails in your head three different ways depending on her mood that morning. Your Sunday night includes a small, low hum of dread about Monday’s stand-up, not because of the work, but because of her.

How Does HPD Actually Play Out in Professional Settings?

The dynamics an HPD colleague creates are complicated and, frankly, exhausting to be near. These individuals often carry a superficial charm that pulls people in at first, so they read as charismatic and magnetic before anyone clocks the cost. Underneath that charm sits a pattern built to keep them at the center, regardless of what it does to the actual work.

Picture the colleague with HPD traits. She might be the one who takes a fifteen-minute status update to forty-five minutes with tangents about her personal life. She might manufacture a last-minute crisis right when a deliverable is due, or quietly turn two team members against each other to keep some drama simmering. Her output is inconsistent by design, brilliant when it earns praise, abandoned the moment it doesn’t. The result is a team stuck in constant reactivity, putting out emotional fires instead of doing the work those fires were supposedly about.

When the person with HPD traits is your boss, the stakes climb. An HPD boss often performs an unpredictable cycle of warmth and punishment: effusive praise one day, a harsh dressing-down the next, calibrated entirely to how much attention she’s receiving, not to your actual performance. She needs to be the most important person in the room, and anything that threatens that status, your promotion, a client praising your work directly, a colleague getting credit, can trigger a punitive response. Teams under this kind of boss go quiet in a specific way. Innovation dries up. Nobody raises a new idea in the all-hands, because a new idea is a threat to the person who needs to be the idea.

I recently went back to Robert D. Hare, PhD, the psychologist whose PCL-R changed how clinicians assess personality pathology, and his co-authored work with Paul Babiak, PhD, an industrial and organizational psychologist. Their book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work (Babiak and Hare 2006) is really about a different Cluster B pattern, but the organizational mechanism they describe, charm functioning as a kind of camouflage that lets dysfunction hide inside a team everyone assumes is thriving, is exactly what I watch happen with HPD dynamics too. The traits differ. The way a team absorbs and normalizes the chaos looks remarkably similar.

How Does HPD Show Up in Driven Women at Work?

Driven women are, in my experience, uniquely set up to absorb the emotional labor an HPD colleague generates. Their empathy, their preference for harmony over conflict, their sheer professional commitment, all of it becomes the exact soil this dynamic needs to take root. They find themselves managing the fallout from a colleague’s outburst, quietly covering missed deadlines, mediating conflicts that were manufactured in the first place, and calling it Tuesday.

Susan, the VP from the conference room, had been living this for three years by the time she came to see me. Her creative director manufactured what Susan had started calling, half-joking, half not, “a crisis every six weeks like clockwork.” Not real professional emergencies. Manufactured storms, engineered to pull focus and consolidate power. Susan, being exactly as competent and responsible as she’d always been, stepped in every time. She smoothed things over with the client team. She kept the launch on track. She told herself this was simply what good leadership looked like.

“I genuinely thought I was being a team player,” Susan told me, turning her water bottle in slow circles on my office table. “I didn’t clock that I was the only adult in a room full of adults. I thought that was just my job. Keep the ship steady. Except I was steadying a ship that someone else kept deliberately rocking, and I was so tired I’d stopped noticing the rocking was on purpose.”

Sitting with Susan that first session, I felt the particular exhaustion in the room before she’d said a third of what she needed to say. Not confusion. Recognition. I’ve sat across from hundreds of ambitious and driven women describing this exact shape: the caretaking reflex mistaken for leadership, the crisis mistaken for an emergency instead of a pattern, three years gone before anyone named what was actually happening.

What I’ve come to think of as the designated adult trap is this specific bind: a driven woman gets quietly assigned, by nobody in particular and everybody at once, the role of the person who absorbs whatever chaos the HPD colleague generates. She’s good at it. That’s the trap. Competence doesn’t get you out of the role. It gets you elected to it, permanently, unless you name what’s happening and hand the role back.

This pattern is especially insidious because driven women are so often conditioned from early on to be the fixer, the one who sees a problem and moves toward it. They rarely clock, in the moment, that fixing this particular problem only feeds it. Every crisis they successfully manage teaches the HPD colleague that crisis-making works. The energy that should be going toward their own next promotion, their own next deal, their own Tuesday afternoon with actual room to breathe, gets siphoned instead into managing someone else’s emotional weather.

What Actually Helps When You’re Managing an HPD Colleague?

Working alongside someone with HPD traits takes a strategic, emotionally intelligent approach. This is what I say to nearly every client who brings this into session: the goal is never to diagnose or fix your colleague. You’re not her clinician. The goal is to protect your own energy and your own professional standing while she does, or doesn’t, do her own work.

First, documentation is your strongest defense. In an environment where narratives get twisted easily, keeping a clear, factual record of interactions and agreements matters enormously. This isn’t about building a case against anyone. It’s about protecting your own integrity and having facts on hand if things escalate. After a verbal conversation, send a short follow-up email summarizing what was decided. If she commits to something out loud, get it in writing within the hour. That paper trail is the single most effective tool I’ve seen clients use to stop reality from getting rewritten after the fact.

Second, practice minimal emotional engagement. Someone with HPD traits often operates from a place of real emotional need, and any response from you, warm or frustrated, can function as fuel. When you’re confronted with a dramatic outburst or an exaggerated claim designed to pull you into her orbit, respond calm, neutral, and stick to facts. This is hard, especially when you feel personally attacked. It’s also one of the most powerful tools available to you. You’re not responsible for managing her emotions. You’re only responsible for your own professional conduct.

Third, maintain strategic visibility. In an environment where an HPD colleague might take credit for your work or quietly undercut your contributions, make sure the people who matter know what you’re actually doing. Don’t assume your work speaks for itself, especially while someone else is actively narrating a different story about who did what. Building strong relationships outside the immediate dynamic gives you a buffer, and it means your reputation rests on your actual performance instead of someone else’s version of events.

Finally, know when to involve HR. The goal is usually to manage this independently, but there’s a line, and past it, the behavior is affecting your well-being, your team’s output, or company policy. When you escalate, frame the concern around observable behavior and business impact, never around a diagnosis. Instead of “my colleague has HPD and needs constant attention,” try: “my colleague’s outbursts and manufactured urgency have delayed three deliverables this quarter, on these specific dates.” Specific dates, specific impacts. That framing gets taken seriously. A diagnosis, even an accurate one, gets you nowhere with HR and isn’t your job to make anyway.

Susan started her documentation habit almost by accident, forwarding herself a one-line email summary after every meeting with her creative director, just so she’d stop doubting her own memory of what had actually been agreed to. Six weeks in, she had a paper trail long enough to show her own manager exactly what the pattern was costing the launch calendar. “I wasn’t building a case,” she told me. “I just wanted proof I wasn’t the one losing my mind.” That paper trail, small and unglamorous, is the middle return I ask nearly every client to build before she does anything else.

Both/And: How Do You Set Boundaries While Staying Professional?

The Both/And framework is a cornerstone of relational trauma recovery, and it works just as powerfully at the office as it does in a marriage or a family of origin. It lets you hold two seemingly contradictory truths at once, which frees you from the trap of all-or-nothing thinking that keeps so many driven women stuck.

With an HPD colleague, the Both/And looks like this: you can recognize that her behavior comes from a real, unhealed wound AND you can refuse, completely, to let that wound run your workday. You can hold compassion for the fact that she’s desperately seeking validation AND you can set rigid boundaries around your own time and energy. You don’t have to villainize her to justify protecting yourself. Those two things were never actually in conflict. They only feel like they’re when you’ve spent years being told that having a boundary means you’ve stopped being a good person.

Tina wrestled with exactly this balance. She’s 49, a practice administrator at an orthopedic clinic, the kind of person whose desk has a single framed photo and a color-coded binder for every provider’s schedule. Her department director turned every staff meeting into a performance, often at the direct expense of the actual scheduling work the meeting existed to do. Tina, who valued efficiency the way some people value quiet, started dreading Thursdays. She felt guilty about the resentment building in her, knowing her director had been through a rough divorce that year. “I kept telling myself I was being unkind,” she said. “Like my frustration was the problem, not the forty-five minutes we lost every week to a monologue about her ex-husband’s new girlfriend.”

In our work together, Tina learned to apply the Both/And lens. She realized she could hold real empathy for her director’s underlying pain while also recognizing that the resulting behavior was corrosive to the team’s ability to function. That shift let Tina stop trying to fix the meetings, a task that was never hers to begin with, and start protecting the twenty minutes of actual scheduling business the practice needed to survive.

The Systemic Lens: Why Does Workplace HPD Go Unchecked?

To really understand HPD’s impact at work, we have to look past the individual and at the systems that let this behavior thrive in the first place. Histrionic and narcissistic patterns don’t exist in a vacuum. Corporate cultures often enable them, and sometimes reward them outright.

Many organizations prize charisma and the appearance of momentum over quiet, steady competence. Someone with HPD traits, who is often genuinely skilled at commanding a room and manufacturing urgency, gets mistaken for a go-getter or a passionate leader. The chaos she creates reads, to leadership two levels up, as high-energy productivity. Systems that lack real accountability metrics, or that actively discourage naming interpersonal friction out loud, become fertile ground for exactly this kind of triangulation.

Tina saw this play out directly. When she finally raised her concerns to the clinic’s owner about the lost meeting time, she was told she needed to be “more of a team player” and “a little more flexible with Dr. Reyes’s style.” The clinic’s culture rewarded the appearance of warmth and energy in meetings. It had no mechanism at all for measuring what those meetings actually cost the practice in lost scheduling hours, in staff turnover, in Tina’s own capacity to do her job well.

For driven women, this systemic failure lands especially hard, because they’re so often the ones quietly holding the entire structure together while the HPD colleague commands the spotlight. When they raise a concern, they get labeled not a team player, told they need to be more flexible, more understanding, more accommodating. It’s worth naming plainly: this is the attention economy showing up inside your actual employer, a workplace culture that has learned to reward whoever is loudest in the room over whoever is doing the most reliable work. Recognizing that dynamic matters. It confirms that the exhaustion you’re carrying home at 6 p.m. isn’t a personal failing. It’s the predictable result of working inside a system built to reward performance over substance.

How Do You Protect Your Professional Well-Being?

Recovering from an HPD colleague or boss isn’t just about surviving the workday. It’s about reclaiming the professional identity and energy that dynamic has been quietly draining. The hypervigilance it takes to get through a dramatic work environment, tracking her mood every morning before you’ve even opened your laptop, takes a real toll on your nervous system. Protecting your well-being here has to be active, not incidental.

This starts with radical acceptance: you can’t change her personality structure. Full stop. Your power lives entirely in your own response. Build a sense of self-worth that doesn’t depend on the workplace weather. Find ways to regulate your nervous system outside of work, whether that’s somatic practice, a hard run before your first meeting, or simply time in rooms where nobody needs you to perform or manage their feelings for them.

Susan, six months into our work, told me something that has stayed with me. She’d started leaving her phone in her bag during her creative director’s tangents instead of checking it under the table. “I’m not performing attentiveness for her anymore,” she said. “I give her the meeting. I don’t give her my whole morning.” The launch she’d been protecting that first day in the conference room shipped on time. The crisis-every-six-weeks pattern hadn’t stopped. What had stopped was Susan organizing her nervous system around it.

If the situation stays untenable despite real, sustained effort at boundary-setting, it may be time to consider leaving. Walking away from a toxic work environment isn’t a failure. It’s a genuine act of self-advocacy. Your career should be a source of growth, not a daily negotiation for emotional survival.

Your professional value has never been defined by your capacity to endure someone else’s dysfunction. By naming the pattern, setting real boundaries, and protecting your own psychological safety, you can start to untangle yourself from the drama and step back into your own authority. You deserve a workplace where your competence speaks louder than someone else’s performance ever could.

This content is psychoeducational in nature and isn’t a substitute for professional mental health treatment. If you’re in crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

Related Reading

• What Is Histrionic Personality Disorder? A Therapist’s Complete Guide
• Signs You Have a Narcissistic Boss (And How to Survive)
• The Sociopath in the C-Suite: When Pathology Is Rewarded
• Executive Coaching for Driven Women

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. Guay JP, Knight RA, Ruscio J, Hare RD. A taxometric investigation of psychopathy in women. Psychiatry Res. 2018;261:565-573. doi:10.1016/j.psychres.2018.01.015. PMID: 29407724.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Babiak, Paul, and Robert D. Hare. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. New York: HarperBusiness, 2006.
• Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly. New York: Penguin Audio, 2012.
• Brown, Sandra L. Women Who Love Psychopaths. Mask Publishing, 2018.
• Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960.

AI use: Researched and drafted with AI assistance; reviewed, edited, and approved by Annie. See our Editorial Policy for details.

Warmly,
Annie.