A great dilemma of management is that the interests of employees and managers don’t naturally coincide (any more than those between managers and owners). Personal, economic, social, and other individual interests can often conflict with the general demands of life at work with others, or of the culture of a particular workplace. A primary challenge, then, for managers is to reconcile these conflicts, where they occur and can be reasonably addressed, so that satisfaction of individual and organizational needs can be integrated in mutually productive ways.
And a challenge this can be, indeed. Often, employees can be just plain contrary. When this is combined with an aimless competitiveness, managers must sometimes confront the issue head on and remove the individual from a team where he or she is causing turmoil, from a position in which he or she is spreading distraction and discontent, or even from employment.
This is not a failure of management, or an inability to express advanced forms of inclusion, diversity, and integration of style. The work place is not Boys Town, there are such things as bad employees, and it is not just management that should be expected to demonstrate disciplined enlightenment.
Of course, the problem is not always among employees - it is just as often, and far more destructively so, among managers themselves. In fact, according to this item from Inc.com, almost half of employees feel that they are subjected to bullying bosses at all levels of management.
Could the focus on the singular attributes of the individual “leader,” - the celebration of force, focus, vision, and indomitable will as characteristics of the putative great boss, rather than as traits instilled in the workforce at all levels by great purposes collaboratively pursued - be a source of such widespread self-centered and abusive behavior by bosses? Self-referential teaching by “leadership gurus” about the elements of individual greatness and the attributes necessary to emulate it are often modelled on people who might be characterized as bullying bosses, spawning legions of bullying wannabees throughout the management ranks.
Obviously, viewing the role of management from the perspective of what your employees are doing for, or to, your path to the corner office isn’t likely to generate a healthy working environment or real organizational productivity. There is nothing inherently wrong with ambition, but if its sole aim is your personal aggrandizement, it is likely, in the end, to realize results as narrow and puerile as, well as the personality of any manager who sees the world of work through such blinders - many of whom are the bullying bosses.
Wherever it is found in the ranks, from entry-level employee to top management, unrestrained bullying behavior is symptomatic of a rudderless, ill-disciplined work environment. It is management’s role to establish and maintain a productive atmosphere for everyone who is willing and able to take advantage of it. Sometimes this even requires doing some house cleaning - indeed, even policing of one’s own ranks.
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