How to manage petty leaders in your organisation – 7

Pettiness is an aspect of neuroticism. Neuroticism is an emotional instability, especially in behavioural responses to stressful situations.

Pettiness is pervasive, and nearly a 100 percent of individuals have experienced pettiness in the workplace. That’s not an exaggeration. Let that sink in for a moment.

Pettiness is a disease afflicting our collective organism on the same scale as the physical ailments we are all too familiar with.

However, this is one pervasive disease we can defeat without expense or suffering. All we need to do is be intentional in our perception of pettiness.

While we are considering how to manage petty leaders in your organisation, start by asking yourself an important question, “what is my pettiness index?”

That simple question is enough to start your journey to practice mindfulness and self-awareness about your level of pettiness as a person. It is a question for both leaders and followers to ponder. At this point, having the correct perception helps to diagnose your behaviour before judging others.

Discussing the nature of petty leadership in organisations raises numerous questions for further exploration. Examples include:

1. How do petty leaders become managers, and how do managers become petty leaders? Are there “early warning signals,” or do petty tendencies only manifest in certain roles?

2. What role do subordinates play in the dynamics of petty leadership? Do certain kinds of subordinates encourage or discourage petty behaviour?

3. What mechanisms govern the process of identification with the aggressor?

4. To what extent do subordinates mimic the behaviour of petty managers in their dealings with clients or with their subordinates?

5. How and to what extent do petty leaders select favoured “lieutenants”?

6. How do petty leaders interact with their clients, peers, and superiors? Are petty leaders deferential toward authority?

7. To what extent is the petty leader aware of their behaviour, and how comfortable are they with it?

8. How do they interpret and justify the behaviour to themselves and others?

9. What becomes of the petty leader? What factors moderate and mediate the effectiveness and longevity of a petty leader’s career?

10. To what extent do certain organisations tolerate or encourage petty leadership?

11. What are the mechanisms by which pettiness becomes institutionalised in an organisation?

12. How might individuals and organisations curb abuses of authority, and how might subordinates cope with petty leaders?

One of the significant components of the leader-follower relationship is the leader’s perception of himself relative to their followers and how the followers perceive the leader.

With followership as the essence of effective leadership, we must emphasise the effect of a leader’s directed actions on follower perceptions and reactions.

To underscore the importance of this phenomenon, a study of 400 promising managers on a fast track showed that some did not reach their expected potential due to a lack of relational skills instead of a deficit in technical skills.

Hence, followers accord or withdraw support to leaders. They also play an important role in defining and shaping the latitudes of a leader’s action through their perceptions (with expectations and attributions) about the leader’s performance.

Mindfulness and self-awareness induce the conditions of followers’ commitment to a leader. It is a key driver for building followers’ self-esteem.

For a jumpstart on effective employee or follower commitment, a leader must be able to create three emotional responses that enhance self-esteem in a workplace environment. They are feelings of significance, community, and excitement.

However, before getting to the point of commitment to the leader, the path to be travelled is from emotional intelligence to self-esteem, then to recognition.

In this instance, emotional intelligence plays a crucial role as a filter in managing petty leaders and pettiness at the workplace.

Behavioural psychologists Mayer and Salovey developed a four-factor concept of emotional intelligence to show leader-follower relational outcomes. The four factors of emotional intelligence are: the ability to appraise and express emotion; the use of emotion to enhance rational processes and decision making; the ability to understand and analyse emotions, and the reflective regulation of emotion.

Read also: How to manage petty leaders in your organisation – 6

The above-mentioned emotional intelligence factors must be in sync with seven leader-follower relational behaviours for effective leadership to occur. Namely, (1) trust, (2) empathy, (3) altruism, (4) commitment, (5) caring/concerned behaviours, (6) openness, and (7) responsiveness. When these seven relational behaviours are connected to the servant leadership model, we see a leader-to-follower relationship to the constructs of (a) commitment to the leader, (b) trust, (c) altruism, (d) service to the leader, (e) love, and (f) service.

Therefore, in the mind of a servant leader, an emotional intelligence filtration produces attributions consistent with a sense of personal satisfaction, appreciation, involvement, and empowerment; however, in the case of a petty leader, it produces a lack of motivation, interest, and commitment to the leader and organisation.

The outcome of a lack of self-awareness and mindfulness vis-a-vis emotional intelligence deals with environmental factors such as workplace atmospheres involving co-workers and team status. It also deals with rewards, recognition, communication, work schedules, and work conditions, all of which can produce attributive levels that lead to a high employee or follower output.

The incidents involving horrible bosses and abusive management are often reported and debated on social media. This regularity, and the variety of organisations in which the incidents occur, suggests that the petty leader who lords their power over others is not a rare person. This article highlights the trend of petty leadership to stimulate our interest in examining ineffective leadership in organisations as it damages the psyche of its human capital.