[lbo-talk] "Bad bosses get promoted, not punished: study"

[B.]

[Oh, look - it's another study that casts a ray of
sunshine on this bleak world! The article advocates
"industry chiefs" intervene to stop the bad bosses
from rising in the ranks. Hilarious. -B.]


Bad bosses get promoted, not punished

By Rachel Breitman
Fri Aug 3, 12:36 AM ET

How do people get ahead in the workplace? One way
seems to be by making their subordinates miserable,
according to a study released on Friday.

In the study to be presented at a conference on
management this weekend, almost two-thirds of the 240
participants in an online survey said the local
workplace tyrant was either never censured or was
promoted for domineering ways.

"The fact that 64.2 percent of the respondents
indicated that either nothing at all or something
positive happened to the bad leader is rather
remarkable -- remarkably disturbing," wrote the
study's authors, Anthony Don Erickson, Ben Shaw and
Zha Agabe of Bond University in Australia.

Despite their success in the office, spiteful
supervisors can cause serious malaise for their
subordinates, the study suggested, citing nightmares,
insomnia, depression and exhaustion as symptoms of
serving a brutal boss.

The authors advocated immediate intervention by
industry chiefs to stop fledgling office
authoritarians from rising up the ranks.

"As with any sort of cancer, the best alternative to
prevention is early detection," they wrote.

They faulted senior managers for not recognizing the
signs of workplace strife wrought by bad bosses. "The
leaders above them who did nothing, who rewarded and
promoted bad leaders ... represent an additional
problem."

The study will be presented at the annual meeting of
the Academy of Management, a research and teaching
organization with nearly 17,000 members, from Sunday
to Wednesday in Philadelphia.