I can assure you that after that interaction with my colleague—which lasted less than a minute—I felt worse about myself. I went from being the happiest I’d ever been about my work performance to worrying that my teaching award would be taken as a sign that I wasn’t serious enough about research (the main standard used for evaluating Stanford professors).
My colleague’s behavior also passes the second test because when the episode occurred, this person was further up the ladder than I was. I learned a lot about her from the way she treated one of her subordinates—in this case, me.
I believe the best test of a person’s character is how he or she treats those with less power. The brief nasty stares, the teasing and jokes that are really camouflaged public shaming and insults, the exclusion from minor and major gatherings—they’re all exercises of power, and they don’t just hurt for a moment. They have cumulative effects on our mental health and our commitment to our bosses, peers, and organizations.
Georgia State University professor Bennett Tepper’s research on abusive supervision, for example, examined a cross section of 712 adults in a midwestern city who worked in the private, nonprofit, and public sectors. He found that many of these employees had bosses who used ridicule, put-downs, the silent treatment, and insults. These demeaning acts drove people to quit their jobs at higher rates and sapped the effectiveness of those who remained. A six-month follow-up found that those still trapped in their jobs suffered from less work and life satisfaction, reduced commitment to employers, and heightened depression, anxiety, and burnout. Similar findings have been uncovered in dozens of other studies. They all suggest that assholes can severely undermine an organization’s productivity.
Given the psychological and financial harm done by assholes, you’d think that most organizations would refrain from hiring them or be quick to expel these creeps once their true selves are exposed. But it’s not so simple. Although I suspect that some people are genetically predisposed to be nasty, years of research has suggested that under certain circumstances, almost any of us is susceptible to becoming an asshole. This is especially true of people who assume positions of power. Study after study has found that giving people even a little bit of power over others can induce them to abuse that power. It isn’t just a myth: power can turn any of us into assholes.
Fortunately, there’s also evidence that we can limit the negative influences of power and keep our offices civil, supportive, and even inspiring places to work. I’ve identified several strategies for combating assholes—and preventing ourselves from becoming one of them.
ARE ASSHOLES BORN OR MADE?
Yes, some assholes are born that way. But there is also strong evidence that no matter what our “personality” is, we all can turn into assholes under the wrong conditions. This happens frequently and with shocking speed and intensity when people assume powerful positions. A huge body of research—hundreds of studies—shows that when people are put in positions of power, they start talking more, taking what they want for themselves, ignoring what other people say or want, ignoring how less powerful people react to their behavior, acting more rudely, and generally treating any situation or person as a means for satisfying their own needs. What’s more, being put in positions of power often blinds them to the fact that they are acting like jerks.
One of my Stanford colleagues, Deborah Gruenfeld, has spent years studying and cataloging the effects of putting people in positions where they can lord power over others. She’s found that even tiny and trivial power advantages can rapidly change how people think and act, and usually for the worse. In one experiment, student groups of three discussed a long list of contentious social issues, things like abortion and pollution. One member was randomly assigned to the more powerful position of evaluating the recommendations made by the other two. After 30 minutes, the experimenter brought in a plate of five cookies. The more powerful students were more likely to take a second cookie, chew with their mouths open, and get crumbs on their faces and the table.
This study might sound silly, but it scares me because it shows how having just a slight power edge causes regular people to grab the goodies for themselves and act like rude pigs. I was on the receiving end of such boorish behavior a few years ago. It was at a lunch with the CEO of a profitable company who had just been ranked as one of the top corporate leaders by a famous business magazine. He treated our little group of four or five professors (all 50-plus-year-old professionals) as if we were naive and rather stupid children. Although, in theory, he was our guest, he told us where to sit and when we could talk. He interrupted several of us in mid-sentence to tell us he had heard enough or didn’t care about what we were saying. He even criticized the food we ordered, saying things like “That will make you fat.” He generally conveyed that he was our master and commander and that our job was to focus our efforts on satisfying his every whim.
The most striking part was that he seemed completely oblivious to the fact that he was bullying us and that we were offended. This is consistent with research showing that power makes it harder for people to see the world from the perspectives of others. In one recent study, Adam Galinksy of Northwestern University and his colleagues divided participants into two groups: members of one group were made to feel powerful by recalling and writing about an incident when they had power over others; the other group was asked to write about an incident in which someone had power over them. Then all the participants were told to draw the letter E on their forehead. If a person drew the E so it seemed backward to himself but legible to the rest of the world, this indicated that he had considered how others would see the letter. If the E seemed correct to himself but backward to everyone else, this suggested a failure to take other people’s perspectives into account.
Sure enough, Galinsky and his colleagues found that people who had been primed to feel powerful were nearly three times as likely to draw the E so it seemed legible to themselves but backward to others. In other words, power made them much less likely to see the world through other people’s eyes.
FIGHT THE POWER
These findings may seem discouraging, but they don’t mean we’re condemned to working with assholes. I’ve spent much of the last few years thinking about how to sustain a humane workplace and how employees can deal with nasty bosses and peers. Based on research and stories that I hear, I’ve developed a few tips for victims of workplace assholes.
My first tip is in a class by itself: Escape if you can. The best thing to do if you are stuck under the thumb of an asshole (or a bunch of them) is to get out as fast as possible. Not only are you at great emotional risk; you’re also at risk of emulating the behavior of the jerks around you, catching it like a disease—what I call “asshole poisoning.”
Indeed, experiments by psychologists Leigh Thompson and Cameron Anderson have shown that even when compassionate people join a group with a leader who is “high-energy, aggressive, mean, the classic bully type,” they are “temporarily transformed into carbon copies of the alpha dog.” Despite the risk of asshole poisoning, escape isn’t always possible. As one woman wrote me in response to this advice, “I have to feed my family and pay my mortgage, and there aren’t a lot of jobs that pay well enough to do that around here.”
In those cases where a victim can’t escape (at least for now), I suggest starting with polite confrontation. Some people really don’t mean to be jerks. They might be surprised if you gently let them know that they are leaving you feeling belittled and demeaned. Other jerks are demeaning on purpose, but may stop if you stand up to them in a civil but firm manner. For example, an office worker wrote me that her boss was “a major jerk,” but she found that he left her alone after she gave him “a hard stare” and told him his behavior was “absolutely unacceptable and I simply won’t tolerate it.”