from the if-you-ever-get-annoyed-you-can-be-self-employed dept.
Research suggests behaviour of co-workers can mirror hostility of their leaders:
A new study has found that hostile behaviours from "abusive" bosses can lead to co-workers adopting similar behaviour, leading to a toxic atmosphere of insecurity and exhaustion in the workplace.
[...] Examples of hostile behaviour in the workplace considered by the researchers included use of inappropriate language, sexual harassment, outbursts, humiliation and misuse of power.
[...] The study also reported an association between experiencing hostile behaviour from leaders and emotional exhaustion and job insecurity, suggesting that mistreatment from peers can damage employees' confidence in their job and their role within an organisation.
[...] Co-author Dr Nadeem Khalid, Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Strategy at ARU, said:
It's clear from our study that hostile behaviour at the top of a workplace is not only likely to be damaging to individuals in terms of their emotional exhaustion and job security, it is also likely to encourage other employees to act in unethical ways, creating a toxic environment across the entire organisation.
That effluent flows downhill perhaps isn't too surprising, but do you think the converse is true, or is it really the case that nice guys finish last?
Journal Reference:
Miao Li, Ammar Ahmed, Obed Rashdi Syed, et al., Impact of abusive leader behavior on employee job insecurity: A mediating roles of emotional exhaustion and abusive peer behavior, Front Psychol, 2022. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.947258
(Score: 5, Interesting) by driverless on Sunday October 16 2022, @11:01AM (4 children)
If you have a toxic leader, the corrosion trickles down from the top and starts to permeate government and society in general.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Gaaark on Sunday October 16 2022, @01:38PM
You. are. my. hero.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 4, Insightful) by krishnoid on Sunday October 16 2022, @06:35PM
I heard from a professor once in class that "corruption comes from the top," which I later adapted to "corporate culture comes from the top." if you have a toxic supervisor, they will: role-model that kind of behavior, recognize it and be able to create policy using it through familiarity (eventually leading to well-versed expertise), and support it in their underlings, eventually fortifying it in the entire sub-organization.
People then have to either adopt that culture, live with it, or behave the way they think is right under cover -- i.e., "lead, follow, or get out of the way", or leave. If it comes from the C-suite ... you either adapt/adjust to it, or there will be nowhere safe for you in the entire organization. At that point you're there for the paycheck.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 16 2022, @10:10PM (1 child)
Yeah it's not very complicated.
The trick to survival is to not take their negativity as a personal failing, which of course is what they are trying to do. They want you to associate your identity with their opinion of you. It's a bit like the mean girls at high school. In fact, it *is* the mean girls at high school. The corporate world is about high school level psychologically - people just get dazzled with the titles and suits and forget this is the same shit all over again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2022, @02:05AM
> mean girls at high school
With some effort I managed to miss nearly all that drama in my suburban public high school. There was one science teacher who opened his room for chess players and other "thoughtful" students, as an alternative to the zoo of the general "study hall" in the cafeteria. Also, it turned out that joining stage crew was a great move--we could hang out in the auditorium just about anytime, unsupervised. If anyone noticed, well, we were working on sets for the next play...
I've been fortunate to duplicate this experience for most of my working life too, first by gig work, where I'd leave before getting involved in office politics. Then later in a tiny family engineering company where we all get along. There is still the occasional prick on the customer side, but that is the exception. Part of the trick might be to specialize enough that a tiny company can offer something that bigger outfits either can't (or won't bother to) compete with.
(Score: 3, Informative) by gznork26 on Sunday October 16 2022, @02:40PM
My wife experienced the same effect on one job in particular. After IBM purchased Rational Software, management style shifted and workplace bullying hit the afterburners. Incidents were fielded by corporate's internal processes, and that team was led by a workplace bully, who in turn mirrored the behavior of the CEO.
So essentially, it was turtles all the way down.
Khipu were Turing complete.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 16 2022, @03:05PM
My first boss was great, until the money got tight and he needed to downsize his department, he chose to let people decide to leave on their own by being a complete asshat attempting to make his new hires look bad at their jobs, including 22 year old me.
42 year old me would have found another job, but 22 year old me wasn't going to let the asshat win, not that way. When he took his firing case for me to the CEO (small shop) I wasn't promoted, right away, but I was moved to the CEOs office & desk that he rarely used, and I started working directly with the CEO instead of through asshat.
If the place was a little bigger or more insulated between the layers that kind of thing wouldn't have happened. Interaction with your +1 and +2 management is important, necessarily rare, but if you have -1 or -2 indirect reports, it's worth knowing them a bit, just Incase some middle management goes asshat on you or your indirect reports.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MIRV888 on Sunday October 16 2022, @03:07PM (5 children)
Having a representative to help you deal with management acts as a buffer to jack@ss and or hostile managers.
It's the only way lower tier employees get any leverage whatsoever.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday October 16 2022, @06:37PM
That may be one of the best arguments for unions -- less for wage/benefits than for abuse prevention. The "free market" might then provide rough wage parity.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Sunday October 16 2022, @06:37PM (1 child)
In a previous (non-unionised) job, I had two bosses who did the same: insulated us from awkward edicts from head office. As long as we kept brining in the money, they were able to overlook trivial non-compliance and had our back against the head honchos.
I'd never go back to that industry, though: there's no way I'd be lucky to find such good management to work under again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2022, @02:08AM
IMO, that is the definition of a good boss for any creative department -- keep the higher-up managers and bean counters away so that the people doing the work can stay focused and not have to worry about the company politics.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday October 16 2022, @07:30PM (1 child)
Sometimes a good HR person can help too. They'll at least document things, which will help a lot if the worker ever decides to take it to Dept. of Labor, attorney, and/or court.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2022, @02:12AM
Sorry, can't agree. Haven't yet met anyone in HR that could fight their way out of a paper bag, much less help the company hire or retain highly skilled people for the important jobs. Maybe they are out there, but I haven't seen any.
If there is any saving grace in HR it's that they are usually nice to look at (in the sense of "attractive people"), but that might be part of the problem...since HR people are often hired by top management.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by inertnet on Sunday October 16 2022, @08:58PM (2 children)
I quit my job after 9 years shortly after a bully became head of the department. "That's what we agreed upon!" in a bullying way. "No, that's what you demanded, I never agreed to it". I quit, but still had to work for another 6 weeks. Which became 2 days, because the rest were overdue vacation days. I have since been self employed for over 35 years. I'm glad things turned out the way they did, but my kids tell me they just want a regular job because they don't want the stress.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 16 2022, @10:12PM
I quit my job of 6 months after the owner / chief manager/ CEO came through the office one late afternoon and chewed everyone in sight a new asshole. I saw it for what it was, he had a bad turn in sales and was feeling insecure about his ability to continue operations, but the way he communicated it was immature in the extreme for a 60+ year old man of his education and experience.
Next day a competing offer came my way, knowing a sign when I see it, I took it. Same salary, better benefits, bigger bonuses, and work from home. No brainer of a decision for me.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2022, @03:23AM
> been self employed for over 35 years
Let me guess, the first five years (or so) were hard: getting in good work, keeping it, learning how to sell, worrying about where the next job would come from. But after about five years you had a reputation and a resume and things started to get much easier.
I've found this is true for a lot of self-employed and tiny companies. For anyone considering quitting and going it alone, this suggests that starting with a some reserve (for food, rent...) or the equivalent (mom's basement?) would be a good thing to have.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday October 17 2022, @12:43AM (3 children)
Money doesn't trickle down, but abuse does, huh?
I've been in more than one toxic workplace. Taken me a long time to recover. My own takeaways are that, first, school doesn't prepare engineers to deal with it. The attitude has always been that such human problems are easy, and future engineers should therefore focus all their studies on the hard stuff, engineering. I've seen this blindness in engineers. Seen electrical engineers act as if tough problems even in science, math, and other engineering disciplines are for them easy, because they're the elite, electrical engineers. They reason that if they can handle EE, they can handle anything.
Engineers are trained to work in a meritocracy. When they absolutely destroy the B.S. arguments the con artists try, they think that's it, it's over, they've won. But a fool of a boss may well not see it that way. They don't understand engineering, can't tell bull and nonsense from a real plan, and are easily tricked by the con artists' "doubt-is-our-product" style of argument. The engineer absolutely must keep records, so that when the scumbag peddler of bull and lies asserts the opposite of what they said last week because that assertion now makes the engineer look bad, and of course denies that they ever said the opposite in the first place, the engineer can show everyone that they are, if not deliberately lying, at the very least wrong and perhaps suffering from memory problems. It shouldn't have to be that way, but so many workplaces are like that. Can be a lot of extra work of a particularly tedious, odious and time wasting nature, to have to keep records for CYA purposes. Don't let them get away with a verbal only directive, way too easy to deny ever having said it. Get it in writing.
Another classic of the b.s. artist is to hog the floor to make a meeting into an inquisition of the engineers, while conveniently evading all questioning of their own moves and plans. They'll also reach for the spurious, hoping to divert everyone down a rabbit hole. Whether the b.s. artist gets away with it depends on many factors.
Then there's withstanding the attack whenever the engineer does make a mistake. The incompetents who can't engineer their way out of a wet paper bag will jump all over a mistake in hopes of shifting whatever blame may be falling on them to the engineer who just messed up.
Also be wary of being asked to do something the boss wouldn't dare ask under their own name. They'll make it sound reasonable, maybe even inconsequential. Like one time, upon discovering a bad problem, the boss (a midlevel manager) asked the chief engineer to tell the manufacturing plant to stop the line. What was not explicit, only implicit, was that his own name would be kept out of that. But the engineer understood that you never, ever stop the line except for the most incredibly severe problems, and threw it back on the boss. Said he'd tell them that the boss wants to stop the line. The boss backed down real fast, and the line was not stopped. Had the chief engineer gone along with that request, and been heeded and the line actually stopped, because his reputation was such that they probably would have taken him at his word, he would've been in a lot of trouble. Maybe fired. At the least, his reputation would be much diminished. No, you don't stop the line. Keep the line going, and the units that go out with the problem will have to be fixed in the field. Expensive, but less expensive than idling the assembly line. Stupid asshole of a boss, for asking that of the chief engineer. Such bosses will ask others to break the law, walk off cliffs, and the like, and actually never realize they're asking too much, never consider that they would not themselves do as they asked another to do. It's how they can make something like that sound ordinary rather than extraordinary. The very bland presentation is one of the factors that makes such requests so dangerous to the engineer who is a little too trusting, accommodating, and afraid to say no.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2022, @01:55AM (2 children)
I'm lucky where I work because my boss, a physicist, says "quantum mechanics is easy; people are hard" when giving someone people management advice.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday October 17 2022, @02:14PM (1 child)
Exactly. "People are hard". Maybe, people wouldn't be so hard for scientists and engineers if they would take those problems more seriously and confidently, and put more effort into working them. Instead, they tend to take the labeling lying down. They believe they shouldn't have to care what jerks think, and they do perceive that the playing field is severely tilted against them, so why even try to play? Introverts, Asperger's, geeks, nerds, four-eyes, teacher's pet, weirdos, even preppies. Such labels have become part of pop culture. I don't know how far back it goes, decades at least. The "normies" have been polishing and exaggerating the damaging narrative that the "smarties" are socially inept. Don't know what to say, how to dress, even how to walk. Don't practice proper hygiene, don't keep their hair neat. Who remembers that "floods" are pants that are too short in the leg? It's not as bad as they make out. Lot of it is mean spirited, jealous in-crowd propaganda, and it works entirely too well. They have numbers on their side. In high school, geeks have to watch their backs all the time. College is a welcome relief from that hostility, but perhaps it shelters students too much. Nice not to have to worry about being cornered and physically abused, and that much of the stock verbal abuse just doesn't fly. But, almost no one can stay in college forever. Have to go back to the "real" world.
All this culminated in the recent turn the jerks had at the levers of power in the US. Perhaps the nation that reveres learning the most, bumbling about in ways that allowed anti-intellectuals to take control. The trolls made as much of a mess as they could. They would've done a lot worse if allowed.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday October 17 2022, @07:06PM
You verbalized many good observations. I don't have much time, but two comments: much of what you're referring to is human ego driven. But much like my second comment, egos manifest in a wide range of areas and depths and strengths.
And secondly you mentioned basically geeks (nerds, dweebs, whatever), of which I'm pretty much one, being less socially "hip"- my observation and theory is that we all have roughly the same brain size and number of neurons. For sure some people are "smarter", better memory, more mental energy, etc. My point is that we can't all be good at everything. I was always very curious about things, science, how things work, etc. And, importantly, I was raised by fairly naive parents- at least, my immediate environment didn't shape me socially, esp. first 10 or so years of life. I lived mostly on a farmette (10 or so acres), we had neighbors, and I had friends, but didn't connect enough to learn things like caring about my clothes, hair, etc. And I went to a very small private school- maybe 20 or so in each grade level. Then we moved, I went to a public school- grade 5, probably 60 per grade level, and all the social pressures, cliques, critical observation of what I wore, what I said, etc. To this day I still don't understand why people make such a big deal out of styles, fashion, what color I paint my house, etc. I (weakly) perceive Europeans to be a bit more open-minded about such things. I had an acquaintance in my teens, same age, who was incredibly socially aware, very popular, but weak (at best) in STEM.