It takes years to build a great career but just months for a bad boss to destroy it. A manager who bullies and blames will spread insecurity wherever they go, with a drip-drip pattern of behavior designed to undermine all who stand in their path. 

Over a third of America’s workforce has experienced abuse from their colleagues in the form of threats, humiliation or sabotage of performance. A further 75% of those who quit do so because of a difficult supervisor rather than the position itself.

The Workplace Bullying Institute has a list of the top 25 workplace bullying tactics and it’s pretty bleak reading.  These include behaviours like singling out and isolating one person from co-workers; publicly displaying “gross,” undignified behaviour; abusing the evaluation process by lying about the person’s performance and even using confidential information about a person to humiliate privately or publicly. It ranges from the hard to identify to the outright aggressive.

But for those feeling rundown by overbearing managers, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. New research indicates that abusive bosses are their own worst enemy in the workplace. 

“Abusive bosses experience significant social costs from their behavior in the workplace, most notably by losing social worth,” says Professor Manuela Priesemuth, whose paper on the effects of office bullying has just been published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. 

Priesemuth and co-author Barbara Bigelow carried out two independent field studies into the impact of abusive behaviour on managers and their workplace performance.

Presenting the results in Psychology Today, Priesemuth explains that prior research on the topic has mostly focused on victim impact of workplace abuse. But this new insight shows that bosses also get a significant hitback from inflicting emotional pain on others.

This takes the form of “feeling less valued” and appreciated by their colleagues, and thereby performing “more poorly” as a result.

So, by behaving in a bullying manner, bosses typically end up harming their own career trajectory. And, having sensed the impact of their behavior on their team, around 85% are open to modifying their ways.

“Our research also showed that the majority of supervisors felt and understood the social repercussions of their actions and were willing to change,” says Priesemuth. 

The study shows that the remaining 15% of bosses display psychopathic tendencies, meaning they are unreceptive “to any social cues and repercussions of their actions”.

The bottom line? As long as your boss isn’t an actual psychopath, there’s hope. Find out more about tackling workplace bullying here. 

Images: Getty, Co-Women on Unsplash