Chapter 1: Why do some bosses behave like bullies?
You work hard to strike the right amount of intelligence and ignorance. The Last Show with David Cooper. Is your boss a total jerk? Or are they just running around on a secret belief that the world is a ruthless cage match where empathy is a weakness? Today, we're going to talk about why your boss is a bully. I'm here with someone who has researched just this.
He's an organizational behavior researcher at Columbia Business School, and his name is Dean Baldiansky. Dean, welcome to the show.
Thank you. Thank you, David, for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
What made you curious about researching what is on at least someone's mind at some point in their life, like jerk bosses, bully bosses? Why look into this from like an academic angle?
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.
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Chapter 2: What motivates bosses to use threatening behavior?
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,
uh dominant or threatening behavior is just not as harmful um and that drives their behavior at work i wonder if there's a takeaway from your research and i do want to dig into the research but let's go down this tangent i wonder if there's a takeaway like when you're interviewing at a company when you're meeting your future boss you should try to suss out what their worldview is and if they view the world as kind of like a dog eat dog world maybe don't take that job
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.
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Chapter 3: How does a competitive worldview influence boss behavior?
This leads them to some kind of threatening dominant behavior. They get the response that they thought they would get. It's usually a negative one. And that reinforces their worldview. And that kind of leads them down the same path of competitive behavior.
So... So that's a dominant boss. That's a boss who is a bully. What makes a boss who's compassionate? What's behind a boss that's good?
Yeah, I think there's so generally, like this isn't this specific project, but generally the field thinks of the other kind of boss as like leading by virtue. So like instead of leading by threats, You sort of lead with your skills or your respect and you try to garner that from your employees or your followers. And then they might be more motivated to do it.
So like broadly, there's like these two kinds of leaders.
Chapter 4: What are the differences between dominant and compassionate bosses?
Those who lead by virtue and those who lead by threats, coercion.
I mean, the second one sounds like the person we don't want, but if I'm running a company, do the threatening bosses, do they get better results even if their employees hate them?
Sometimes they do. I mean, it really depends on the company and the culture, but some companies value that, you know. You could probably think of maybe a manager you had in the past or someone who was just being an a**hole. And they may have gotten reward for that. I don't know. Do you have any story of like a manager that...
Yeah, I had a boss that like only time I ever found out that he was happy with my performance was when he was talking to other people and he just pushed me and pushed me and pushed me. And in some sense, yes, he got that extra 5% out of me.
But that extra 5% meant 10,000% of my mental health suffering and just thinking this boss was going to fire me at all times and everything I did wasn't good enough. For sure, this boss saw the world in this competitive worldview way. I have had a boss like that. And I'll be honest, it was not fun working under him.
And did that change your worldview?
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Chapter 5: Can threatening bosses achieve better results?
How would you say that impacted how you saw the world or maybe how you saw the specific workplace you worked for? If that boss kind of just kept their job, maybe got rewarded for it?
Well, he eventually left and then it kind of taught me to really like interview my boss when I look for a job or look for a team change. Like it really just don't look for those qualities. I didn't quite have it as hashed out as your research about the competitive worldview, but any future boss that seemed like they were like that, I would try not to end up on that team or end up at that company.
Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
Now back to your research. What other takeaways can we learn about bosses being bullies and kind of their motivation behind it?
Yeah, so I think in one of our studies in this package, we tested sort of a potential intervention. So one way that organizations might change the manager's sort of dominance or threatening behavior, and that is that just reflecting on some kind of potential relationship harm or benefit really causes this major shift in behavior.
So what we did is instead of incentive-compatible paradigm, we had participants imagine that they're either managers or employees in a company. And the managers were incentivized to get their employees to do like this really lame sort of boring task that you could do if you want to,
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Chapter 6: What strategies can organizations use to reduce bullying behavior?
but you really don't want to do it. It's kind of laborious. So the managers could motivate their employees to do it with either being dominant or threatening or being non-dominant, non-threatening. And what we find, so we randomly assign these managers to condition. So some managers reflected on the potential benefits of sending that dominant threatening messages.
And benefits, I mean, like specifically about the relationships with the employees and the other managers reflected on the potential harms. And that led to three times the size. There were three times more likely the managers reflected on the benefit of that dominant message, the dominant behavior, to send that dominant message.
that that's crazy with such a small intervention, a small reflection on the impact you get such drastic change. And that's maybe something organizations can do if they want to change their culture.
It certainly is. That's an interesting finding as well. I appreciate you coming on the show and discussing jerk bosses with me and your research into them, Dean. This has been a fun conversation. Yeah, thank you so much, David.
Chapter 7: How can employees identify a bully boss during interviews?
I appreciate it. Dean Baltiansky is a organizational behavior researcher at Columbia Business School.
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