There aren't many things worse than having a hostile boss who is constantly screaming and belittling you. A new study suggests that the best way to handle a boss that fits this description is by passive-aggressively giving them a taste of their own medicine.
"Before we did this study, I thought there would be no upside to employees who retaliated against their bosses, but that's not what we found," Bennett Tepper, lead author of the study and professor of management and human resources at The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business, said in a news release.
"The best situation is certainly when there is no hostility. But if your boss is hostile, there appears to be benefits to reciprocating. Employees felt better about themselves because they didn't just sit back and take the abuse."
Tepper and his team of researchers sent 169 participants two separate surveys by mail, seven months apart.
In the first survey participants completed a 15-item measure of supervisor hostility developed by Tepper in 2000. They were asked to rate how often their bosses did things such as ridiculing them and telling them that their "thoughts and feelings are stupid." They were also asked how often they retaliated.
Seven months later the same respondents were surveyed about their job satisfaction, commitment to their employer, psychological distress and negative feelings.
The surveys revealed that workers who returned the hostility were less likely to report psychological distress and more likely to be satisfied with and committed to their jobs.
The workers who returned hostility most successfully did it by ignoring their boss, acting like they didn't know what their bosses were talking about, and giving just half-hearted effort, reported the release.
"These are things that bosses don't like and that fit the definition of hostility, but in a passive-aggressive form," Tepper said in the release.
The study didn't directly cover how exactly this returned hostility creates higher job satisfaction.
The findings were published in the journal Personnel Psychology.
