Stand up to abusive boss; you’ll be a better worker

I think we can all agree that the best way to deal with abusive bosses and managers is to round them up and ship them to a small island in the Pacific Ocean, preferably one populated by an unusually large number of hungry tigers.

Sadly, that method is logistically and legally complicated, and I would feel bad for the tigers. So we look to more sensible ways of handling superiors who make our lives miserable.

Standing up to a bully seems the strongest approach, but it also sounds risky when the person you’re confronting controls your career. Of course, standing up to someone doesn’t mean shouting that person down, and a new study suggests the benefits of even subtly taking a stand against an abusive boss might well outweigh the risks.

Bennett Tepper at Ohio State University and Marie Mitchell at the University of Georgia began examining what happens when subordinates responded to “downward hostility” from superiors with passive-aggressive behavior. Some workers in the study reported that they would do things like ignoring their unpleasant supervisors, acting like they didn’t know about something they were supposed to know about or making “a half-hearted effort” at a task.

“We went in not really sure what we would find,” said Tepper, a management and human resources professor at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business. “My assumption was that these passive-aggressive behaviors would be counterproductive. But we found that’s not the case. People who reciprocated the most were more committed to their jobs, more productive and less depressed.”

I’ll take an important pause here to clarify that the study in no way suggests that employees start being passive-aggressive. Tepper and Mitchell agreed there are far better ways to handle a nasty boss — talking to the person directly, reporting the person to someone higher up or even finding another job. But the overarching point of the study was that workers who felt they were standing up or retaliating in some measure were less likely to feel like victims.

“Definitely, the results of our study imply that if a person is getting abused by their supervisor, a sustained display of hostility, that standing up for yourself and making yourself not feel like you’re being victim is important and that makes them feel more committed and more satisfied,” said Mitchell, an associate professor of management at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. “They don’t feel the psychological distress of an individual who just takes it.”

Another part of the report looked at what kind of impact passive-aggressive retaliation might have on a person’s career. Again, the results were surprisingly positive.

In the study, published in the journal Personnel Psychology, the researchers noted that “upward hostility was positively related to career satisfaction and career expectations” and that “subordinates fare better when they perform acts of upward hostility.”

Again, this is not a green light to start being a jerk right back to your jerky manager, but it is an endorsement for learning to show that you have a backbone.

“If you’re firm, you’re less likely to see yourself as the victim,” Tepper said. “It sends a message to the hostile boss. We know from other research that abusive bosses are very strategic in who they go after. They pick and choose targets. Who do they settle on? It’s the ones who seem weak or vulnerable. If a person is engaging in some form of standing-up behavior, to the extent the boss notices what’s going on, there’s a message they’re getting that this might not be the right person to go after.”

From a company’s standpoint, none of this is good. Abusive bosses inevitably cost the company money — through disgruntled workers not performing well or simply leaving — and any kind of employee-manager tension bleeds over to co-workers and harms workplace efficiency.

“These events don’t happen in a vacuum,” Mitchell said. “Other employees see them.

“When you engage in these tit-for-tat hostilities, they not only affect those two people but they affect the wide work environment and potentially could multiply the costs to the company.”

So the No. 1 step, as far as I’m concerned, is for companies to make sure they don’t have managers who are unkind knuckleheads. Part of accomplishing that is creating an environment in which workers aren’t afraid to point out that someone is being an unkind knucklehead.

Mitchell said open-door policies that allow people to feel they can speak without retribution and systems for reporting abuse that make people feel safe are critical to creating a culture that tamps down problem supervisors.

From the employee standpoint, the best response depends on the individual. Some are comfortable standing up to authority figures, finding ways to calmly draw a line in the sand.

Others struggle with that kind of assertiveness, but that’s a skill that can be learned. If the study teaches us nothing else, it’s that finding a way to develop your self-confidence — whether it’s through counseling or sports or even martial arts — is a worthy endeavor.

Nobody deserves to get walked on at work. But until the abusive bosses of the world get shipped off to that island, we’re going to have to face up to them ourselves.