COLUMBUS, Ohio – If you’ve ever had a boss who yelled at employees, ridiculed or intimidate them, new research from Ohio State suggests a little payback might be good for you.
Two new studies from OSU’s Fisher College of Business found that employees who had hostile bosses were better off on several measures if they returned the hostility and suffered no negative career consequences.
“Before we did this study, I thought there would be no upside to employees who retaliated against their bosses, but that’s not what we found,” said Bennett Tepper, lead author of the study and professor of management and human resources at the college.
Retaliating or returning the hostility does not mean getting into shouting matches with your boss. Tepper says the study found that employees returned hostility by ignoring their boss, acting like they didn’t know what their bosses were talking about, and giving half-hearted effort.
When they did that, Tepper says they felt less like victims and experienced less psychological distress, more job satisfaction and more commitment to their employer.
The findings, published online in the journal Personnel Psychology, came from two surveys.
One survey asked participants how often they retaliated against hostility by doing things like ignoring their supervisor. Seven months later, the same respondents completed measures of job satisfaction, commitment to their employer, psychological distress and negative feelings.
The second survey asked questions designed to test if the employees felt like a victim in their relationship with their boss and whether employees had been promoted and whether they were meeting their income goals.
Results showed that employees who turned the hostility back on their bosses were less likely to identify themselves as victims, less likely to report psychological distress and more likely to be satisfied with and committed to their jobs.
In the second survey, the employees reported they did not think their actions hurt their careers, Tepper said.