填空题
A recent survey reveals that a startling 37 percent of the country’s workforce—some 54 million people—have bosses who scream at them, belittle them, sabotage their work, and are otherwise aggressive. Social scientists and policymakers are very concerned about this toxic phenomenon, if only because of the enormous personal and economic costs. It’s hard for people to do their best work when they are busy trying to avoid the office ogre.
So why are workplace tyrants so common What’s the psychological dynamic underlying such dysfunction at the top It’s not simply the power; there are many powerful bosses who are good and decent—or at least tolerable. Power corrupts only some—but which ones and why Two psychologists recently decided to explore one possible explanation: perhaps it is power, but only power mixed with incompetence, that leads to aggression and abuse.
Nathanael Fast of the University of Southern California and Serena Chen of the University of California, Berkeley, ran a series of experiments to test this theory in different ways. They found: people who felt inadequate were abusive only if they also were in positions of power, and powerful people were mean and aggressive only if they suffered from self-doubts. Neither power nor incompetence was enough by itself to turn a boss bad, just the combo.
So what can be done to stop this cycle from escalating In still another lab experiment, the psychologists again manipulated feelings of power and competence, and again measured workers’ aggression—in this case their willingness to undermine another worker’s performance. But in this version of the simulation, the researchers deliberately boosted some of the volunteers’ feelings of self-worth by praising them for their leadership skills. Others got no such ego booster.
And guess what Power plus inadequacy still equaled aggression, except for those who got that simple shot of self-worth. As reported online this month in the journal Psychological Science, just a little praise was enough to wipe out the aggressive tendencies of the laboratory "bosses".
This will also come as no surprise to office underlings, who have long known about the strategic value of flattering the boss. But the researchers see a certain irony in this last finding. Excessive flattery may temporarily bolster the boss’s ego and temper his abusive behavior, they say, but it could ultimately worsen the situation by causing an incompetent boss to lose touch with reality. That may be OK for the funny pages, but it’s not so funny in the real world of work.