Bad bosses get promoted, not punished:

[EV_Ares]

NEW YORK (Reuters) - How do people get ahead in the workplace? One way seems to be by making their subordinates miserable, according to a study released Friday. In the study to be presented at a conference on management this weekend, almost two-thirds of the 240 participants in an online survey said the local workplace tyrant was either never censured or was promoted for domineering ways.

"The fact that 64.2 percent of the respondents indicated that either nothing at all or something positive happened to the bad leader is rather remarkable -- remarkably disturbing," wrote the study's authors, Anthony Don Erickson, Ben Shaw and Zha Agabe of Bond University in Australia.

Despite their success in the office, spiteful supervisors can cause serious malaise for their subordinates, the study suggested, citing nightmares, insomnia, depression and exhaustion as symptoms of serving a brutal boss. The authors advocated immediate intervention by industry chiefs to stop fledgling office authoritarians from rising up the ranks."As with any sort of cancer, the best alternative to prevention is early detection," they wrote.

They faulted senior managers for not recognizing the signs of workplace strife wrought by bad bosses. "The leaders above them who did nothing, who rewarded and promoted bad leaders ... represent an additional problem."

The study will be presented at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, a research and teaching organization with nearly 17,000 members, from Sunday to Wednesday in Philadelphia.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070803/od_nm/work_bosses_dc;_ylt=AgaryU_.Fa3xfqzrCB8.ZGUuQE4F

[glowing]

1. Well look at top dog CEO types... typical assholes thinking everyone

else is designed to serve their pleasure.. why wouldn't they promote other assholes?

[ixion]

2. exactly...

:applause:

[lynnertic]

3. Corporate culture in the US reminds me of the Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis

The book is about the demons' life in Hell.

[The Vinyl Ripper]

4. All you have to do is....

Read Dilbert.

Scott Adams bases his cartoons on stories sent to him by his readers.

Back in the dark ages when I worked construction, I saw an abusive boss shut the hell up when a worker threatened in all seriousness to throw him off the third floor.. :evilgrin:

The rest of the crew cheered..

[TZ]

5. This is not limited to corporations

Bullying is almost a worse problem in academia and government where it is next to impossible to fire certain people no matter how obnoxious and bullying they are.

[Lasher]

6. I had a really bad boss who was forced into early retirement

And I had a hand in it. I sometimes laugh out loud when I think about that. He was a really vicious guy.

[Cronus Protagonist]

7. I know how that works so well

Do really well, and your coworkers will band together to attack you. Your immediate boss will slander you to his bosses to stay on the good side of the herd who don't like you. You will be scapegoated and handed the worst assignments until you quit or they amass enough lies to get you fired. Once you're gone, everyone breathes a sigh of relief and the bad manager gets a promotion for generating good camaraderie and departmental cohesion.

However, if you're a nasty fucker or completely incompetent, you're going to win big time. If you fuck up a little, your coworkers will cover for you, but will nod and wink that you're the cause of the failures. Your immediate boss will enjoy being in the know and being treated as one of the gang. This can go on indefinitely. And then, when you fuck up really badly, your immediate boss will cover for you so he doesn't look so bad. Then you and he will be co-consipirators from then on, making sure no one else finds out about your mutual incompetence, and so you and he will then work together to repay each other for your loyalty. Over the years, these alliances grow and dominate the business unit you're in and, as they say the cream, I mean the shit floats to the top.

Welcome to the corporate world!

[Buns_of_Fire]

13. Corporations are like septic tanks. All the big chunks float to the top.

Hell, not only are the authoritarian creeps promoted well beyond what the Peter Principle would suggest, they're fast-tracked to the top echelons!

I once worked for a consulting firm whose name you probably wouldn't recognize anyway. Finally, fed up, I quit, stating in my letter of resignation, "I don't know what _____'s problem is, but I have no intention of it becoming MY problem." A few years later, I heard from a co-worker that the one of the client's honchos had finally said to him, "Let's see... You can't program... You're not an analyst... You're certainly not a manager... So what DO you do around here?"

He was gone within a month. Sometimes, Karma pulls through quickly enough for us peons to enjoy it.

[MorningGlow]

8. They needed a study to find this out?

:eyes:

[EV_Ares]

10. I laughed at that too. What I really want to know is what is going to be

done about it. As the one poster said all they had to do was read Dilbert.

[MorningGlow]

15. Seriously

All they needed to do was ask me about past bosses I've had--I'd have been able to describe quite a nice cross-section of assholes I've worked for over the years, from retail managers to magazine editors to manufacturing execs (temp jobs in college) and advertising poobahs (a very misguided foray into that evil world when I was young and stupid). In return I'd only ask that they give me the millions that they probably spent on this study. Or even half the total; I'm not greedy. :evilgrin:

[CrispyQ]

9. Some occupations seem to attract the very people that shouldn't be in those occupations:

management, law enforcement & politics come to mind. Perhaps clergy, too.

In spite of all the leadership seminars & retreats I've seen various management teams participate in, I don't see much improvement in actual leadership, just a lot of big heads.

[EV_Ares]

11. I have known very good people in what would be considered a high

position or well paid staff member who does fine and really good work. They then promote him/her to where they have to supervise other employees and they are the most god awful person you could ever imagine. No management skills whatsoever. They do not know how to delegate, no people skills, they are just the kind that needs to be in an office by themselves.

[Buns_of_Fire]

14. Can't have a peon making more than their boss, no sir.

From my experience, a lot of this stems from the pay scales used by companies. When a person "tops out" in their classification, they tend to get bumped into the next higher classification -- whether they want to be there or not.

I was a damned good technician. Finally, I reached the top of my scale, so I was made a manager -- a position I was hardly suited for given the company's ethos. I was there to ride herd on my staff -- but, more often than not, I would recommend them for raises. I was too "hands on," I was told. Hell, that's what I WANTED to be!

[Golden Raisin]

12. It's not just about spiteful and

bullying bosses. It's also about incompetent ones. Where I work the corporate solution for a mistake-prone, clinker executive/supervisor/boss is called a FUMU Promotion. Translation: "Fuck Up, Move Up". They just boot them up to an even higher-level position.

[Nikia]

18. I dislike incompetent bosses most

I sympathize a little bit with competent bosses who aren't the best managers.
When I think about what would happen if I got promoted, I am not sure. There are high demands on our department. The other people in our department could do better. As a manager, I am not sure how I would handle motivating them to do better so that our department would be meeting expectations. If I was working my hardest and thought that they weren't, I might end up being a mean boss.

[EV_Ares]

19. I hate the ones that are not secure in their job which also would put

them in the incompetent catagory.

[Peregrine Took]

16. It takes a certain type of person to be a boss. In my whole working life I

only had 1 or 2 good ones.

[kenny blankenship]

17. The "bad" leader is there to represent a bad system, on behalf of its absent owners

Why does it surprise anyone that the "bad" leader gets rewarded?