A study of
American workers released today found that nearly half have worked for an
abusive boss. This study was conducted by the Reed Group for the Employment Law Alliance. They surveyed a representative sample of 1,000
American adults within the past two weeks, which resulted in interviews with
534 workers. Much research on bullying
and abusive supervision uses “convenience samples,” which means the researchers find anyone
they can to complete the survey, a method that does not produce results that can be generalized
to a larger sample. So this study uses a much
better sample than most. Check out the press release if you want to learn more.
The main finding was that 44% of the respondents said they have worked
for a supervisor or employer whom they considered to be abusive. I will write a longer post about this later,
but it adds to a growing body of research demonstrating that workplace assholes
are a serious and widespread problem. And
note that this is a study supported by a big group of employment lawyers, who
are leading the charge against organizations that allow, or even encourage, such
abuse to persist.
So it might be a lot cheaper and less time-consuming to
implement the no asshole rule in your organization now, then facing an onslaught
of lawyers and lawsuits later. I am not a fan of litigation and believe that
some people who routinely file lawsuits are assholes who do it to exact revenge.
And some do it in place of therapy (or
as a misguided form of anger management therapy). But if some companies won’t implement the rule
for the right reasons, perhaps the threat of litigation will cause them to implement
it for the wrong reasons
P.S. I was also interested in their findings that “Southern workers (34%)
are less likely to have experience with an abusive boss than are their
Northeastern (56%) and Midwestern (48%) counterparts.” In the 1980’s, I worked with Anat Rafaeli and
Larry Ford on a study of courtesy in 7/Eleven Stores. Larry, who was then their director of field
research, drew a representative sample of 576 stores (out of about 7000 in North America), and had an army of
researchers who went into the stores to observe employee courtesy – measured as
greeting customers, smiling, establishing eye contact, and saying thank you. We
found a similar pattern: people in the South were the most civilized and people
in the Northeast were least. Midwesterners
and Westerners were somewhere in the middle.
P.P.S. This graphic is actually from a Reuters story about The No Asshole Rule, but I like it so much that I have been looking for an excuse to post is again.
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