Chapter 11 – Dominance and Aggression in the Workplace

Dominance interactions and aggression are commonly found expressed between individuals in the workplace. How one goes about dealing with this often hinges on the personality of individuals in high positions, those climbing the corporate ladder, and those doing their job without aspirations for climbing the ladder. The relationships between individuals can often be determined through logical approaches, but they become complex when asocial and antisocial behaviors play a role in how people dominate their subordinates and how subordinates react to the way they are treated. In order to accomplish their work and arrive at their desired position in the working world, most individuals may logically assume that doing their job properly and paying attention to rules and regulations will pave the way to their success. Under ideal circumstances, this may be true. However, given the complex personalities of people in general and the complications that can arise from them, agonistic behavior is often expressed in all phases of the working world and for many reasons, and it is not uncommon for an individual to experience conflicts that result in disharmony. There are certain personalities in the working world, just as there are in the nonworking world, which parasitize coworkers and the system to which they belong. As we have seen, discrepancies in human behavior may have many sources, making human expressions the complex result of almost unlimited malfunctions. Bullies are commonly encountered, and it is not only in the workplace that these individuals are found. Evidence indicates that serial bullies express themselves in the workplace, in the community, and at home. Toxic leaders (often referred to as boardroom hitlers, little hitlers, managers from hell, or bosses from hell) are bullies who have responsibility over a group of people or an organization and abuse the leader/follower relationship by leaving the group or organization in a worse-off condition than when they first found them. The volitional account of moral failures in leaders does not provide a complete account of this phenomenon. The reason leaders behave unethically may be because they willingly behave in ways that they know to be wrong. Price, however, suggests that leaders can know that a certain kind of behavior is generally required by morality but are mistaken as to whether the relevant moral requirement applies to them in a particular situation and whether others are protected by this requirement. He demonstrates how leaders make exceptions of themselves, explains how the justificatory force of leadership gives rise to such exception-making, and develops normative protocols that leaders should adopt. Toxic managers have been described as the managers who bully, threaten, and yell: those whose mood swings determine the climate of the office on any given workday and who force employees to whisper in sympathy in cubicles and hallways about the backbiting, belittling boss from hell. The reader should recognize that these characteristic features of a bully and toxic leader are the same characteristics that personify many dominant (often psychopathic) individuals in all sorts of human activities, including those mentioned in the following chapters. No human activity is without them.