Intimidating Bosses Can Change — They

LEADERSHIP

Just Need a Nudge

by Zhenyu Liao
August 31, 2020

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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.

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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
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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.

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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.

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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
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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.

This article is about LEADERSHIP

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