A journalist recently wrote to me, worried about getting her journalism career back on track after being derailed by a supervisor. She wrote that in "my first salaried journalism job ... I worked closely with a verbally abusive director. It was a tough decision, but I felt I had to protect myself and decided to leave."
She left her job and feared that she had walked away from journalism. But her old boss stayed on.
That's the way it goes with abusive bosses, says Jonathan Shaffer. Bad bosses are Shaffer's business. He and others in the Department of Management and Organizations at the University of Iowa study them. Shaffer, a doctoral candidate, says that the abusive boss is not likely to disappear as our young journalist did, provided the boss is good in other ways. Shaffer's reasoning stems from a new study that his research team put together called "Perpetuating Abusive Supervision."
Stephen Courtright, a doctoral student on the research team with Shaffer, said in a phone interview that more than 200 undergraduate business students at the university volunteered to participate in the study.
To do the study, Shaffer said, "we created a news article that looked like an article but was actually fake. The news article took the form of something that you might see in BusinessWeek. What the article looked like was that a reporter had done an article inside the organization, interviewed the boss and the subordinates. We put in exchanges between the boss and the subordinates or we put in quotes by the subordinates about the boss. We put in exchanges that we know bad bosses have. ... Specifically, we were looking at verbally abusive bosses."
They measured verbal abuse by asking people to rate statements, such as "My boss is rude to me;" "My boss yells at me;" "My boss gives me the silent treatment;" and "My boss ridicules me in front of others."
At the end of the faux article, the researchers put financial information that showed the boss was meeting business goals. The article also said that the boss was coming up for a contract renewal. Researchers asked subjects whether the abusive but successful boss should be renewed.
"What we found was that the way these people answered these questions was totally unrelated to the way the boss treated his subordinates," Shaffer said. "All that people wanted to see was the numbers."
Participants in the study would say that the contract should be renewed, even though they said they would not want to work for that boss.
"We have a lot of research in our field that shows that these abuses in the workplace have a really bad effect on people. Morale goes down. Job performance goes down. Absences go up."
Shaffer said that verbally abusive bosses will keep their jobs unless they are related on a relational measure as well as a quantitative measure.
"My guess is that if they keep producing the outcomes on paper that supervisors are looking for, nothing much will happen unless things get really bad. Look at Bobby Knight. He was very abusive, but nothing much happened because he was winning, until things got really bad and reached the point of no return. Steve Jobs is a genius in the field, but is known to be very abusive and his abuses are well-known and well-documented."
Robert I. Sutton, professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, mentions Knight in his book, "The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't." The book grew out of Sutton's 2004 article in the Harvard Business Review, "More Trouble Than They're Worth," which the review recognized as a "breakthrough idea" in 2004.
Sutton has written that there is lots of evidence that workplace bullying hurts organizations and that it is fairly widespread, and he's written extensively about how workers can deal with abusive bosses. In response to the good reception of "The No Asshole Rule," Sutton wrote on his blogthat "enforcing the no asshole is not only humane, it is wise from an economic perspective -- as an economist would put it, the rule leads to efficient use of human capital. I am confronted with one case after another of how pervasive nastiness drives skilled people out of their jobs and occupations, and short of that, massively undermines their performance."
So, what did Shaffer say, in general, about the journalist's boss? "Pretty much everyone encounters a boss like that," he wrote. "Everybody has one. I personally would probably quit my job if I had a boss like that, but not everyone has that luxury."
Shaffer said that while one bad boss can make life miserable for dozens of people, he does not believe they are the norm. "To have an abusive boss like that, as far as a string of them, is unusual," he said. "In studies of abusive leaders, we think the percentages are pretty low."
As for our journalist, she is getting her career back on track and is writing again for an online news service.
Thanks to Jill Geisler, who writes Poynter's SuperVision column. Here's a column in which she mentioned Sutton and his book. You can read Sutton's work on his blog, "Work Matters," and see him in a video interview, "Good Boss, Bad Times," posted by McKinsey Quarterly.
She left her job and feared that she had walked away from journalism. But her old boss stayed on.
That's the way it goes with abusive bosses, says Jonathan Shaffer. Bad bosses are Shaffer's business. He and others in the Department of Management and Organizations at the University of Iowa study them. Shaffer, a doctoral candidate, says that the abusive boss is not likely to disappear as our young journalist did, provided the boss is good in other ways. Shaffer's reasoning stems from a new study that his research team put together called "Perpetuating Abusive Supervision."
Stephen Courtright, a doctoral student on the research team with Shaffer, said in a phone interview that more than 200 undergraduate business students at the university volunteered to participate in the study.
 | | ||
 | AFTER THE BAD BOSS |  | |
| |||
|
|  | |
| |||
They measured verbal abuse by asking people to rate statements, such as "My boss is rude to me;" "My boss yells at me;" "My boss gives me the silent treatment;" and "My boss ridicules me in front of others."
At the end of the faux article, the researchers put financial information that showed the boss was meeting business goals. The article also said that the boss was coming up for a contract renewal. Researchers asked subjects whether the abusive but successful boss should be renewed.
"What we found was that the way these people answered these questions was totally unrelated to the way the boss treated his subordinates," Shaffer said. "All that people wanted to see was the numbers."
Participants in the study would say that the contract should be renewed, even though they said they would not want to work for that boss.
"We have a lot of research in our field that shows that these abuses in the workplace have a really bad effect on people. Morale goes down. Job performance goes down. Absences go up."
Shaffer said that verbally abusive bosses will keep their jobs unless they are related on a relational measure as well as a quantitative measure.
"My guess is that if they keep producing the outcomes on paper that supervisors are looking for, nothing much will happen unless things get really bad. Look at Bobby Knight. He was very abusive, but nothing much happened because he was winning, until things got really bad and reached the point of no return. Steve Jobs is a genius in the field, but is known to be very abusive and his abuses are well-known and well-documented."
Robert I. Sutton, professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, mentions Knight in his book, "The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't." The book grew out of Sutton's 2004 article in the Harvard Business Review, "More Trouble Than They're Worth," which the review recognized as a "breakthrough idea" in 2004.
Sutton has written that there is lots of evidence that workplace bullying hurts organizations and that it is fairly widespread, and he's written extensively about how workers can deal with abusive bosses. In response to the good reception of "The No Asshole Rule," Sutton wrote on his blogthat "enforcing the no asshole is not only humane, it is wise from an economic perspective -- as an economist would put it, the rule leads to efficient use of human capital. I am confronted with one case after another of how pervasive nastiness drives skilled people out of their jobs and occupations, and short of that, massively undermines their performance."
So, what did Shaffer say, in general, about the journalist's boss? "Pretty much everyone encounters a boss like that," he wrote. "Everybody has one. I personally would probably quit my job if I had a boss like that, but not everyone has that luxury."
Shaffer said that while one bad boss can make life miserable for dozens of people, he does not believe they are the norm. "To have an abusive boss like that, as far as a string of them, is unusual," he said. "In studies of abusive leaders, we think the percentages are pretty low."
As for our journalist, she is getting her career back on track and is writing again for an online news service.
Thanks to Jill Geisler, who writes Poynter's SuperVision column. Here's a column in which she mentioned Sutton and his book. You can read Sutton's work on his blog, "Work Matters," and see him in a video interview, "Good Boss, Bad Times," posted by McKinsey Quarterly.
Comments