Toxic bosses harm employees in countless ways — for instance, by lowering morale, diminishing well-being and increasing work-family conflict. When do supervisors perpetuate abuse in organizations, when don’t they and why?
To begin answering these questions, we turned to existing research from the non business world. Psychologist Albert Bandura, for example, developed social cognitive theory to explain how behavior — including abusive behavior — is learned from role models. For modeling to be successful, Bandura argued, an observer must pay attention to the modeled behavior, remember the behavior and be motivated to reproduce it. Despite what the theory suggests, however, other studies show that many individuals do not model observed behavior.
These conflicting bodies of research suggest that the processes that interrupt cycles of abuse are not well understood. So we turned to research on identity and identification to understand when and why abused supervisors in particular might change course by being less abusive and more ethical leaders.
We tested our idea across several studies and found that when they disidentified with their manager, those who experienced abuse demonstrated more ethical leadership behaviors than those who weren’t mistreated. In other words, being abused by a fictional manager and seeing yourself as different from him or her made participants moreethical than participants who weren’t mistreated.
In contrast, when supervisors relied less on their moral identity, abuse from their managers did not result in any significant disidentification. So what should employees and leaders take away from our research?
Individuals might be able to inoculate themselves from the abuses of their supervisor through disidentification, which can lead to more ethical and less abusive behavior. This suggests the cycle of abuse isn’t inevitable in organizations. But if efforts to short-circuit the modeling of bad behaviors are to be successful, organizations should select supervisors who have strong moral identities, or work to strengthen the moral identities of current managers.
