What’s the line between what people view as an abusive boss versus one who simply dishes out “tough love”?
According to a new study published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process, for many people, it depends on the boss’s performance.
Researchers at Ohio State University and Providence College conducted two studies. In the first, 576 full-time employees in the U.S. completed three surveys about how abusive they thought their boss was, how well their boss performed, and their own career expectations. Employees who thought their boss was a high performer were more likely to say their boss was full of “tough love.” They were also more likely to believe they would be promoted, and less likely to ignore or disobey their boss.
But employees who thought their boss was incompetent were more likely to say their boss was abusive, and more likely to retaliate by ignoring them or not following orders.
In the second study, the researchers brought 168 undergraduate students from a management course into the lab. The researchers told the students they were part of a team with a leader, and they would be contributing ideas to a plan to solve a problem on campus. In reality, there were no teams or leaders. Participants randomly received either an abusive message (“Don’t waste my time coming up with stupid ideas!”) or a non-abusive one (“I want the team to do well, so try hard”) from a leader. Then, they had to submit ideas to their leader. Again, students randomly received one of two conditions: Half were told their team performed well above average, while the other half was told the team was well below average.
Students then completed surveys about their boss. They were asked to review their leader and if they would volunteer to help their leader complete another similar task; they were also given the opportunity to either recommend or withhold bonus points from their leader. Students who were told their team and leader performed highly gave their leaders better reviews and reported less abusiveness than students with teams and leaders who were low performers.
However, despite what people may think, the researchers stressed that there is never a good excuse or reason for abusive bosses, even if they are high-performing.
“It is important to underscore that there remains no compelling evidence to suggest that abusive supervision, in and of itself, improves individual, unit, or organization functioning,” the researchers wrote. “Quite the contrary, the appropriate conclusion from extant research is that when abusive leaders are productive, it is in spite of their hostility toward their followers, not because of it.”