When bosses thrive on humiliating employees

Free Malaysia Today

16-06-2025

Some managers use shouting and humiliation as tools to enforce compliance or assert their authority. (Envato Elements pic)
PARIS : From offices to construction sites, toxic management poisons many professional environments with behaviour like shouting, humiliation, inappropriate comments and more.
However, a study conducted by researchers at the University of Georgia (UGA) is challenging our understanding of this phenomenon. This kind of abusive behaviour does not always signal a loss of control, owing to stress or tiredness, for example. Some managers use it as a carefully calculated strategy.
This insight came to Szu-Han Lin, professor of management at UGA's Terry College of Business, while watching 'Hell's Kitchen'. In this television show, two teams of chefs compete for a position as head chef in a restaurant. This all takes place under the watchful eye and, above all, the harsh comments of British chef Gordon Ramsay.
Over the course of the episodes, we see him yelling, humiliating, and sometimes even insulting the contestants – for hours on end. Millions watch this spectacle without batting an eye. Lin, however, saw it as a subject of study.
Her team interviewed 100 supervisors from various sectors, including construction, nursing and retail. Then, in a second phase, 249 other managers were monitored daily for two weeks. The questions were simple: why do you mistreat your employees? And how do you feel afterward?
When abuse becomes a management tool
Their answers are insightful but disturbing: some supervisors openly admit to using shouting and humiliation as management tools to enforce compliance or assert their authority. And unlike those who crack under pressure, these managers feel no guilt. Worse still, they feel a sense of satisfaction.
Researcher Szu-Han Lin was inspired by the 'bad behaviour' of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. (Fox pic)
'If they engage in these behaviours with a goal in mind, like boosting compliance or preserving their identity as leaders, they're satisfying an emotional need,' Lin explained.
This discovery challenges decades of research on the subject. 'We have been studying abusive behaviour in the workplace for 20 years, and we have known it always has bad outcomes for performance and productivity,' the researcher said. 'But we also know that people keep doing it.
'We assumed that if managers engaged in these behaviours, they'd feel bad and it would always have a negative effect on them. But that's not the case.'
For Lin, this new awareness must change the way managers are trained. 'It's important for leaders to recognise they may have motivations for acting abusively to help them find better leadership tools,' she explained.
'You may want your followers to listen to you, or you may want to make sure you establish your role as a leader. That's fine, but there are other ways to achieve that.'
Regardless of the motivations, managerial mistreatment remains counterproductive, as it destroys motivation instead of stimulating it. 'If you engage in abusive behaviours, it will always lead to negative outcomes. No one will be motivated at all,' Lin concluded.
It's a lesson that should give pause to anyone who thinks that authority goes hand in hand with brutality.