Intimidating Bosses Can Change — They Just Need a Nudge
by Zhenyu Liao
August 31, 2020
Many people believe that leaders need to adopt a tough-minded approach to steer their organizations in the right direction, or that leaders must be great intimidators with strategic bullying tendencies. After all, a tough mindset is often seen as necessary to take the helm of large corporations, especially those with mutinous organizational members, rigid management systems, or turbulent business environments. There is some truth to these beliefs. But this doesn’t mean that abusive leadership works. Far from it: While it may produce instrumental results in the short-term, the long-term consequences can be much more devastating, both for employees and the organization as a whole.
When I examined manager-employee relationships in the United States and China, I found that when leaders were verbally aggressive to subordinates, it propelled the subordinates to contemplate better approaches to daily tasks and boosted the next-day task performance. Earlier research likewise found that after being publicly humiliated by managers, these professionals would try to solve their work problems due to the fear of ensuing intimidation and punishment.
But this isn’t the whole story. The benefits I documented only occurred temporarily among the few subordinates who believed that leaders intended to squeeze better work outcomes. More importantly, when I aggregated all observed daily performance, they, on average, performed much worse than subordinates who never experienced managers’ mistreatment during the two-week study period. In a separate research project studying relationships with a time range from one month to a year, I similarly found that employees being mistreated, even just occasionally, would perform far less well than expected in the long run, have a low commitment to both their managers and company, and engage in counterproductive work behaviors and hostile behaviors quite frequently. Apparently, the short-lived, seemingly functional effects yielded by managers’ abusiveness incur substantial long-term costs of organizations.
Interestingly, managers are often unaware of these subtle but nuanced detrimental consequences. Executives and managers also often fail to notice the adverse repercussions that intimidators may cumulatively generate. As a result, corporations have been minimally effective in developing appropriate solutions to curb managers’ abusiveness and intimidation. Some programs that highlight prescriptive behavioral norms, like diversity training, can even backfire — managers can feel threatened that their behavioral autonomy and latitude to work they see fit is curbed and thus intentionally go against those principles to protect their managerial independence.
My research and that of others indicates that despite these difficulties, toxic leadership behaviors can be curtailed when workplaces use a powerful, collective “nudge” system. In this system, executives and employees at distinct levels of the organizational hierarchy collectively encourage constructive leadership behavior from managers in three ways: a process-oriented leadership evaluation program, a situation-based leadership training program, and employee self-shielding program. Here’s how I saw each of these programs working and what evidence I found for their success.
Leadership Development to Nudge Constructive Behavior
Process-Oriented Leadership Evaluation Programs.Companies often struggle to identify abusive and intimidating leaders in time, in large part because most companies evaluate a leader’s performance on financial measures and subjective perceptions, ignoring the process by which managers get those numbers. Many toxic managers often have stunning numbers on their performance and management skills.
To address this, a process-focused leadership evaluation program focuses on all specific work-related and interpersonal actions that managers have taken to achieve better collective performance. It can be great help in dispelling the illusory effects of numbers and surface necessary leadership interventions. Arrow Electronics’s CEO evaluation and feedback program, as described by the company’s then-CEO in this 2008 HBR article, provides a good example.
First, Arrow Electronic’s independent directors met individually with three executives to discuss how well the CEO led and motivated their executive team, whether the CEO helped create a culture supporting the company’s mission and values, and other leadership process-related questions. The independent directors then compared notes and shared issues with the CEO in a board meeting. But they didn’t just flag issues; they also provided their thoughts and suggestions for improvements.
The approach used by Arrow Electronic resonates with the core ideas of leadership development theories that highlight the importance of constant action- and process-focused evaluation and feedback in preventing inappropriate leadership behaviors and nudging constructive leadership behaviors. In this case, the feedback derived from the evaluation program provides the CEO with proper and timely guidance on how to adjust leadership behaviors to develop stronger executive team and achieve better outcomes. It helps to stop some subtle but impactful leadership problems from escalating to a managerial crisis.
Research backs up how much of a difference this makes. A study conducted with 60 senior and middle-level managers by D. Scott DeRue and Ned Wellman documented that concrete and frequent feedback on leadership processes from colleagues helps managers with high work challenges be more aware of their ineffective leadership behaviors. It also allows them to continuously and more appropriately adjust their ways of handling their employees’ performance and interpersonal problems, all leading to well-led work teams.
Situation-Based Leadership Training Programs. Most companies find that leadership training initiatives don’t work, as they rarely see expected transformations from managers and executives. This is largely because managers often find themselves wrestling with transferring their one-time off-site training experiences into their real work. But programs that emphasize sustained learning and application opportunities, and that situate leaders in their respective management contexts, do work and are especially helpful at nudging managers to restrain from being abusive and intimidating.
A simple but practical approach is the leadership reflection and transcending intervention, which I often use in my leadership development course. I first ask managers to recall a time when they displayed abusiveness toward followers and write down what they did, why they did, and how they felt. Then, managers write down all occurred consequences (both functional and dysfunctional) of their behaviors for both themselves and the targeted subordinates. Then, I ask them to develop three better alternatives for dealing with that situation, should they experience something similar again. Further, I pair managers together and ask them to share their experiences and alternatives; the manager listening needs to provide their feedback and suggestions for these alternatives or offer other alternatives that might be more effective and motivating.
The usefulness of such a leadership self-reflection exercise was documented in a nine-month quasi-experimental study with 173 working adults who were engaging in a series of four leadership developmental simulations as part of their MBA training program. During this study, all participants had one-on-one meetings with researchers after each simulation for approximately 40 minutes. Participants in the experimental condition were guided to systematically walk through how effective they felt as a leader in the simulation, what they did inappropriately, and how they could do better. They also generated specific actions they planned to take for the improvement in the forthcoming simulation.
Participants in the control condition randomly discussed what they generally did in the last simulation. Researchers found that participants in the first group were better able to correct previous ineffective leadership behaviors and had a higher level of leadership skills at the end of four simulation sessions. Similar reflection training programs could be of great help for nudging managers to correct their misbehavior toward subordinates and develop their leadership skills.
Employee Self-Shielding Programs. Companies could also proactively offer a program that facilitates employees to collectively cope if they find themselves dealing with toxic leadership behaviors. Research on power dependency and followership suggests that employees under the same toxic leader can work together to reconstruct the power dynamics with the leader and manage up to curb abusive supervisor leadership behaviors.
One good way for employees to do so is to form a coalition with colleagues suffering similar supervisory mistreatments and coordinate to restrain their manager from getting sufficient and immediate support and resources for achieving valued goals. Companies can help catalyze the formation of the coalition by encouraging or organizing employee learning and mutual support programs. Those programs should be independent from managers and exclusive for employees to share work experiences and develop collective strategies to combat toxic leadership behaviors. For example, employees could create a regular lunch break series to communicate how their toxic managers have mistreated them and discuss how they could curtail managers’ sense of superiority and prevent future abuse. Once employees develop stronger collective power, they will be more likely to be successful in pushing managers to take reconciliatory actions to amend their strained relational dynamics.
Additionally, employees can learn from others during these programs, acquiring valuable work skills, knowledge, and abilities. Doing so can boost their instrumental value and increase their managers’ dependence on them. This is important because, when abusive managers increasingly rely on employees, employees are then more powerful of asking for the amends for inappropriate manners and nudging constructive leadership behaviors. Research findings based upon multi-wave survey data from a total of 343 middle- and senior-level managers and their employees reveal that if employees use the above strategies to boost their influence power, they experience significantly less abusive treatments from their managers later on.
Organizations could also implement employee self-development training programs to guide employees to use some implicit influence tactics to push back against abusiveness from managers appropriately when suffering mistreatment. One feasible approach, based upon some illuminative findings from one of my ongoing research projects, is to use factual-based nudging. When involved in abusiveness and intimidation dilemmas, employees, by default, tend to be either confrontational or silent. But neither of these responses seems effective. Instead, employees can be trained to actively calm the situation down by presenting how they can’t effectively get work done due to the mistreatment. To be sure, this is not an easy thing to do; but such factual-based nudging does help intimidators realize that their behavior is abusive and unacceptable and leads them to reduce continuing damage.
The Extended Impacts of Abuse
The consequences of toxic leadership behaviors extend beyond employees; they also create unexpected psychological costs for managers themselves. In a pair of daily studies to examine how managers responded to their abusive leadership behavior, my colleagues and I found that in the aftermath of yelling at or humiliating subordinates, managers tended to feel guilty and morally impure. To ease such negative feelings about themselves, managers would seek to make amends by paying more attention to the needs of abused employees and providing extra resources, support, and work guidance. Although such post-hoc interpersonal amendments might be helpful for managers to regain feelings of morality, these actions ultimately reduced managers’ efficiency, as they diverted their time and energy from other important work.
This drives home my key point: abusiveness and intimidation are not viable influence tactics for leaders, even those with great charisma. And while there may be situations where firing a leader is necessary, in many cases companies can design a set of programs to transform the behavior of intimidators by nudging conscientious, developmental, and inspirational leadership behaviors. These nudging programs are built upon the collective efforts of organizational members across different levels of hierarchies and intended to develop constructive interactional dynamics between managers and employees — rather than impose severe punishment on those “great” abusive leaders.
Zhenyu Liao is an assistant professor in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University. His research primarily focuses on the areas of leadership, behavioral ethics, social inequality, and online labor markets.
