Dean Baltiansky

Thank you.

Thank you, David, for having me.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah, I mean, bosses can be jerks, you know, and I really just, there's all this work that tries to understand why bosses behave in a threatening sort of aggressive way towards their employees.

And the answers aren't that clear.

So what me and my collaborator did, we thought that there's probably some kind of miscalibration where bosses just kind of misunderstand or don't know the impact of their behavior.

And especially the impact on relationships with our employees.

And that's kind of how we started this project.

And it turns out that in the background, like you suggested, there's this worldview that is informing these predictions.

So some people just believe that they live in this competitive jungle.

It's just like all or nothing, dog-eat-dog world.

And in that world that they conjure up in their head,

Yeah, that's a takeaway maybe for an employee.

You could probably get at that implicitly if you're careful.

But I think the takeaway for managers or for organizations, there's like the sort of optimistic take from all this is that people...

are sometimes jerks without realizing what they're doing.

Like, they're not intending to do any kind of harm, but because they're stuck in this pretty competitive and ruthless world, they end up inflicting the harm.

I guess the pessimistic takeaway from this is that this...

and sometimes perpetuates this vicious cycle where they have this worldview.

This leads them to some kind of threatening dominant behavior.