Yelling back at the boss

We’ve all suffered incompetent or unpleasant bosses. But if yours is outright abusive, what should you do?

Yelling back at an abusive boss can help employee satisfaction. Photo: iStock.

We’ve all suffered incompetent or unpleasant bosses. But if yours is outright abusive, what should you do?

We at HBR were intrigued by research suggesting that employees feel better about working for a “hostile” boss when they’re hostile back. Fight fire with fire? That sounded like terrible advice.

So I called the paper’s lead auth­or, Bennett Tepper of Ohio State University, and asked him to describe his work and its implications.

In two surveys, Tepper and his colleagues asked American adults how often they experienced abuse from their boss. The survey included prompts like: “My supervisor ridicules me” and “my supervisor tells me that my thoughts and feelings are stupid”.

Then they asked whether people ignored this abuse or responded in kind, through passive-aggressive behaviour or in some cases by simply yelling back. Those who were hostile to their supervisors reported less psychological distress and were happier with their careers. But as Tepper explains, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

What question were you trying to answer with this study, and what did you find?

We have always assumed that when a boss is hostile to an employee, an employee might want to be hostile back, but they wouldn’t perform hostile behaviours in response because there is just too much risk associated with doing that. You are economically dependent on your boss. He or she could fire you. There are lots of things that could go badly for you.

So going way back, we had always assumed that if we were to look at upward hostility as a response to downward hostility, that we would find not much relationship. But we found the opposite, that in fact one of the best, most reliable consequences of downward hostility is upward hostility of various sorts, passive-aggressive kinds of responses and also active-aggressive kinds of responses, actually yelling back at the boss.

So that evokes other kinds of questions like: “What are the consequences of expressing hostility towards a hostile boss?”

And that is what led you to start asking: “How does this affect their satisfaction at work, how does it affect how they feel about their career?”

Exactly. We knew from other studies that if your boss is hostile towards you, you are going to be less satisfied with your job, less committed to the work. I have found no upside whatsoever to a boss being hostile, even though there is a lay belief out there that if you kind of kick people a little bit, maybe you can get them motiv­ated. We never seem to find evidence of that.

So if in fact people are getting something out of being hostile towards their boss, maybe it would be reflected in some of these outcomes that we know to be negatively affected by exposure to downward hostility.

We set up two different lines of reasoning that led to two different predictions. One is that, if your boss is hostile towards you, and you respond with hostility, that will just make things worse. That was the hypothesis I thought for sure was going to be supported.

The alternative hypothesis is the idea that if you reciprocate your boss’s hostility, it will actually make things a little bit better and you will feel more satisfied, or not as depressed and psychologically harmed.

We found a surprising result: although a person is more likely to feel like a victim when their boss is hostile towards them, they are much less likely to feel like a victim when they reciprocate their boss’s hostility.

Walter Frick is deputy editor of HBR.