Managerial Aggression Breaks the Contract
In the excellent "The Social Life of Information" by John Sealy Brown and Paul Duguid, the authors suggest that organisations function only when there is a consistent widespread breaking of the rules throughout the organisation. To see why this is true you only have to watch the chaos that ensues when a union decides to "work to rule", that is, to do everything by the book. We quickly discover that "the book" not only does not describe how the organisation actually works, but in fact describes a completely dysfunctional organisation.

Sadly, unwritten rules which breach the written ones in a consistent and predictable manner can never be captured and are therefore very hard to transfer to information technology which demands very clear, strictly adhered rules. The implicit contract is also underpinned by trust and good will. Managers who forget that get themselves in trouble very quickly and now we have the research to support the common sense.

Yelling at and using other non-physical intimidation toward subordinates may motivate employees to get their work done on time, the company may suffer financially in the long run, according to a study "Abusive Supervision and Subordinates' Organizational Citizenship Behavior," in the December issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA).

The study found that supervisors who were abusive to subordinates by engaging in sustained displays of hostile verbal or non verbal abuse (including yelling or screaming at someone for disagreeing, using derogatory names, aggressive eye contact, intimidating by use of threats of job loss or humiliating someone in front of others) had employees who engaged in fewer discretionary actions that promote organizational effectiveness, such as helping coworkers, not complaining about trivial problems and speaking approvingly about the organization to outsiders.

The study was done by Kelly L. Zellars, Ph.D., and Bennett J. Tepper, Ph.D., of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Michelle K. Duffy, Ph.D., of the University of Kentucky and the full document [really bad pdf file] is here

When will supervisors grasp that an organisation is a very powerful, dynamic and complex system that generates emergent behaviour across a network? They get what they model and what they reward, but absence of a dressing down is NOT a reward and those who bully, abuse and treat badly will have their revenge. This process, BTW, is completely scalable, from a business to a community to a nation to the world. Look around.