Mean bosses are actually getting a good rap... well, sort of. A new study reveals that consistently rude bosses get higher approval ratings than those who exhibit both nice and rude behaviors.
Researchers found that people with consistently rude or unfair supervisors are significantly less stressed than those managed by more erratic superiors. Surprisingly, consistently rude bosses also result in significantly more satisfied employees.
"Our findings essentially show that employees are better off if their boss is a consistent jerk rather than being a loose cannon who's fair at times and unfair at other times," Fadel Matta, lead author of the study and a researcher at Michigan State University's Broad College of Business, said in a statement. "We found that inconsistent treatment is much more stressful than being treated poorly all the time."
The latest study, published in the Academy of Management Journal, involved both a laboratory experiment and a field study. The laboratory experiment consisted of 160 college students who had their heart rates monitored while performing a stock pricing task. The field study involved employees from 95 employers from a variety of industries.
Participants in the lab experiment were divided into three different groups. One group was always treated fairly, another was always treated unfairly and the last was treated both fairly and unfairly. The latest findings revealed that students who received inconsistent treatment were significantly more stressed than those who received consistently unfair treatment.
"Contrary to the intuitive notion that more fairness is always better, our work shows that being treated consistently unfairly can be better for employees than being treated fairly sometimes and unfairly other times," researchers explained. "Variably fair treatment resulted in greater physiological stress than both consistently fair and consistently unfair treatment."
The second part of the study revealed the same results.
"In a multi-level, experience-sampling field study, we replicated the positive association between justice variability and stress, and we also showed that justice variability exacerbated the positive, daily relationship between general workplace uncertainty and stress," researchers wrote in the study.
While the study revealed that mean bosses were better than their "hot and cold" counterparts, researchers noted that consistently nice superiors always produce the best results.
"Let's not lose sight of the fact that the best outcomes for employees occurred when their supervisors were consistently fair," study co-author Brent Scott, an associate professor of management at Michigan State University, said in a statement. "However, if supervisors are going to be unfair, the results suggest that they would be better off behaving that way all of the time."
