Abuse or ‘tough love’? Study examines why some bad bosses get a pass

Columbus, Ohio — Do some bosses who are abusive toward employees get away with it simply because they’re “high performers?” A recent pair of studies took a look.

For the first study, a team from the Ohio State University Fisher College of Business asked 576 U.S. workers in various industries to complete three online surveys. The workers answered questions about abusive behaviors by a boss and how they would rate their leader’s overall effectiveness.

When the workers rated their boss as a high performer, they were more likely to label them as a “tough love” type of supervisor. On the other hand, when a boss was identified as a low performer, the respondents were more likely to label them as abusive.

“Tough love” bosses were described by the workers as “stern but caring,” “insensitive but nurturing” and “rough but well-meaning.”

For the second study, study co-author Bennett Tepper, a professor of management and human resources at OSU, examined how 168 undergraduate students responded to an “abusive” and a “successful” leader in a lab experiment.

The participants were told they’d be working in online teams led by an MBA student. The researchers sent one of two messages (abusive or not) purportedly from the MBA student leader. The abusive message told the participants not to “waste my time coming up with stupid ideas!” The other message encouraged the participants to “try hard.”

After receiving one of two other messages – that the team performed well above or well below average – the participants were asked to review their leader.

The participants whose team performed well above average and received the stern message didn’t grade their leader as hard on being abusive.

“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 in the study’s conclusion. “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. Until there is evidence of upsides that can be directly attributed to abusive supervision and that make up for the many downsides observed in prior work, organizations should eschew acceptance of abusive supervision and be wary of circumstances that may lead them to do otherwise.”

The studies were published online in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.