Exploring supervisors’ two‐faced response to their past abusive behavior

Quite possible. Though, playing devil's advocate, I wonder if requiring propriety still manages to filter out the majority of bad actors.

I certainly see a decent number of commenters who are clearly rude and not making an effort to cover it, whose comments wouldn't pass muster even if they weren't rude, and getting modded away. (There's also some amount of rudeness that looks reasonable to the political tribe being rude, which generally remains in place; it's hard to establish objective-seeming norms around this so I'll set that aside.) Lastly, I can think of only one recognizable commenter who I'm pretty sure was acting like a deliberate troll on a few occasions: starting out with what I'm pretty sure he knew was a straw man argument, and then using his rhetorical skill to just mess with the people arguing back, rather than making a coherent point.

Be yourself is terrible advice! Be yourself unless you’re a dick, in which case seriously consider being someone else.

What paper did you read? It wasn't the one that was linked which stated the opposite of what you just said.

>So, anxious people (depressed or grandiose) feel they have to lie, manipulate, abuse to stay where they are at

As someone who has anxiety and knows several people with anxiety, this has not been my experience at all. Like I am probably in a lower paying job than I should be despite my performance because I am too anxious to ask for a raise or interview around. I am not good enough socially to manipulate people, if I had those skills I would probably not be anxious. I have learned at a very young age to treat people very well because I need long term relationships, I can't quickly charm someone new if destroy my current relationships. My anxiety makes my sensitive not just to criticism but toward the feelings of others. Some anxious people are assholes just like some charming people are. But most are just normal people trying to play the hand they were dealt.

Symptoms of anxiety disorders do not include lying, manipulating, or abuse. You're pathologizing shitty behavior when the truth is that some people do bad things for reasons that have nothing to do with mental illness.

>anxious/grandiose

You mean narcissistic? Anxiety gives people panic attacks when they see a water glass too close to the edge of a table, I think you're talking about grandiose narcissism. It fits your description of "crippling shame and fear, combined with grandiosity."

I've never seen these studies claiming anxious people tend to be immoral in their behaviors at work. Do you have a link? My personal intuition is that "grandiose" and "anxious" people are quite distinct groups with very distinct behaviors.

A policy of firing people with anxiety issues seems particularly cruel, almost designed to vindicate their feelings of anxiety.

Why fire them? Put them in sales.

So fire people with mental illness, once it’s “discovered”? You say that like it’s some monstrous character fault.

Conflict in the workplace happens, including things that crop up due to people’s neuroses. You’d have to fire most people.

I agree you should distance from anyone that appears dishonest or abusive, but that has nothing to do with mental illness. People that just do it to get what they want are if anything worse.

In the abstract they do say explicitly that they broke new ground with the study.

> anxious/grandiose people will never change inside (without years-long therapy)... I'm not talking about anxiety like a normal person normally experiences (you)

But writing comments on the Internet is these people's therapy.

You might appeal to Alexandra, patron saint of the paywalled scientist?

"First, we provide insights regarding how supervisors respond to their own abusive behaviors, which allows organizations to better address its consequences. By exploring how abusive behavior impacts the supervisor him/herself, we help to identify potential “blind spots” in how abuse can promote (or inhibit) other behaviors. Specifically, we find that symbolized moral identity is a key characteristic that prompts abusive episodes to impact image concerns and subsequent impression management behaviors. Thus, organizations might consider offering ethics trainings to help supervisors monitor their symbolized moral identity when it comes to mistreating subordinates. Such trainings have been shown to impact individuals’ other forms of moral perceptions (Reynolds, 2008). Similarly, other scholars have advocated for employees to develop their self-monitoring and political skills being that they are critical when it comes to favorable impression management tactics (Bolino et al., 2016), suggesting a valuable focus on symbolized moral identity. In this way, these trainings may help supervisors become more aware of the impacts of their behavior for their image which, as indicated by our findings, may lead to some degree of reparatory behavior – albeit inauthentic reparatory behaviors.

Second, our findings have implications for the selection of organizational supervisors. That is, organizations that place greater emphasis on authenticity regarding leadership or organizational climate (George et al., 2007) would benefit from our findings, particularly when it comes to supervisor selection. Specifically, we find that supervisors who endorse less of a symbolized moral identity are less likely to have image concerns and thus less prone to engage in impression management tactics that may be perceived as inauthentic following abusive episodes (Eastman, 1994). Thus, it behooves organizations that want to develop highly authentic supervisors or organizational climates to seek to hire supervisors that are lower (or at least not higher) on symbolized moral identity.

Third, prior research indicates that engaging in daily impression management tactics comes with a personal cost to the actor. Specifically, impression management tactics have been linked to greater subsequent daily cognitive depletion, exhaustion, anxiety, work-family conflict, and sleep (Klotz et al., 2018; Wagner et al., 2014), while potentially being deceptive to the supervisor themselves (Conger, 1990). Supervisors who engage in abusive episodes not only experience greater daily image concerns, but in attempting to resolve those concerns with daily impression management tactics, are likely to generate greater personal exhaustion, anxiety, and work-to-family hardships (Wagner et al., 2014). While it would be most beneficial for organizations to integrate training initiatives that aid supervisors to develop better interpersonal and leadership skills as a means of curtailing abusive episodes in the first place (Tepper, 2000), it would also be advantageous for organizations to provide support for leaders that have engaged in abusive episodes to more effectively cope with the image concerns they experience as a result of mistreating their employees. Further, providing training to supervisors on the implications of their behavior—moral or image— may prove to be a fruitful path forward for practitioners. Recent research has highlighted the value of self-reflection for supervisors (Lanaj et al., 2019) as a means of fostering improved behaviors; encouraging such reflection may help supervisors to more genuinely respond to their past behavior, rather than engage in surface-level, image-focused behaviors.

Finally, Eastman (1994) indicates that impression management tactics are received unfavorably when perceived as insincere or there are ulterior motives for the behaviors (see also Harris et al., 2007; Leary, 1996). Our study shows that prior-day abusive episodes precede next-day ingratiation, exemplification, and self-promotion behaviors. Given the temporal proximity of abusive and impression management behaviors, third-parties (e.g., subordinates, the focal supervisor’s direct supervisor) may view next-day impression management behaviors as insincere or owing to ulterior motives of the supervisor trying to repair his/her damaged image as a result of his/her prior day abusive behaviors. Indeed, our emphasis on within-person variation on such impression management behaviors underscores this point; within-person variation on impression management behaviors, by deviating from the supervisor’s typical impression management behaviors, may warrant additional attributions of insincerity. This lack of attributed sincerity can undermine the effectiveness of the impression management tactics (Eastman, 1994; Leary, 1996) or erode the supervisor’s relationships with others (Kim et al., 2018). Thus, supervisors who engage in any form of abusive episodes would benefit by being cognizant that their impression management approaches intended to repair their image concerns may be interpersonally costly. In other words, impression management behaviors should be employed with caution given the potential downsides of those behaviors (Bolino et al., 2016). Instead, managers may find value in employing more genuine forms of reparative behaviors, rather than impression management behaviors, following episodes of abusive behavior."

Could you elaborate? You're more worried about three academic theories/frameworks existing than having a jerk of a boss?

I haven’t heard these terms before and I am paywalled from the actual study, but my first reaction is to view them with suspicion since the level of academic rigor in these fields seems very low in general. And yes they do end up having an impact on all of society when their conclusions are popularized and amplified by activists ultimately. So the caution is warranted.

There is a large random component, and also a large popularity component.

It looks like the survey surveyed 100 supervisors; that would be more difficult to do independently than just surveying 100 rank-and-file employees. (The alternative would be to run this inside a FANG or similarly large company, and then try to get permission through the formal process to get a paper or book published.)

This seems to be part of the debate about Timnit Gebru exit from Google.

I was going to post pretty much this.

Makes you wonder whether it's hidden behind a paywall for a reason.

I'm sure those paywalls are also hiding a lot of actually decent science, but it appears that just as many rely on them to hide their sloppy research.