Employees Fight Abusive Supervisors with Lower Productivity

It might sound obvious to anyone who’s toiled under a despotic supervisor, but researchers at Florida State University have quantified the ways employees quietly fight back:

• 30 percent slowed down or purposely made errors, compared with 6 percent of those not reporting abuse.
• 27 percent purposely hid from the boss, compared with 4 percent of those not abused.
• 33 percent confessed to not putting in maximum effort, compared with 9 percent of those not abused.

On the other hand, employees without abusive bosses —or perhaps those who learned how to manage them—were “more likely to proactively fix problems and approach their supervisors with ideas to help the company.”