Study Says 2 In 5 Bosses Lie

Freshly Exhumed writes to tell us about a Florida State University study of 700 employees indicating that nearly two of five bosses don't keep their word. The study will be published later this year. From the article: "The abusive boss has been well documented in movies ('Nine to Five'), television (Fox's 'My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss') and even the Internet. 'They say that employees don't leave their job or company, they leave their boss. We wanted to see if this is, in fact, true,' said Wayne Hochwarter, an associate professor of management in FSU's College of Business."

In other news...

[DivineOmega]

Scientists discover grass is green, the sky is blue and dirt tends to be a brownish colour.

Re:grievance committees

[the_rev_matt]

I worked for a manager whose style would best be described as "scream, berate, humiliate, threaten". I generally threw up every morning before heading in to work because of the stress. This was during the early 90's recesssion, so finding another comparable paying job (only slightly above minimum wage) wasn't an option.

Re:correction

[Bovarchist]

This supports my theory that 40% of all people are assholes.

Re:Boss == work??

[fm6]

In many cases, the environment at a company is colored by the behavior and the policies of the boss (or bosses).

Your immediate boss doesn't "color" your environment; they are the single individual that has the most to do with creating your environment. They set your deadlines and goals, help you get resources, evaluate your performance, give you permission to take time off... it's a big list.

I've never worked for a big company that wasn't dysfunctional and overbureaucratic to some degree. I think it's just in the nature of organizations of a certain size. It can be a pain, but it's something you deal with. But a bad boss makes your life hell, no matter what the general environment is.

Re:grievance committees

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an excellent point. Most lying bosses want you to think of them as their friend/supporter.

I thought my last boss was great and for the most part he was.
However he had been promising a better position for almost two years claiming he was trying to convince middle-management that I was more than qualified.
Then a person in that position quit, making it easier for me to move to that slot but they hired someone else from outside the team. Then my boss quit.
I now see he was just stringing me along to make sure he didn't lose head-count.

Re:grievance committees

[ricree]

He didn't threaten anyone. He just implied (to someone who apparently did like to implicitly threaten people) that any threats of violence were unlikely to be successful.

Re:Griefers in the workplace

[Miguelito]

No one wants to confront an employee directly for fear of looking like a loud mouth jerk of a boss.

I think some of it is that, but more of it is likely they think they'll be seen as a failure if they have to fire/discipline someone underneath them.

One of my only complaints about my job is along the same lines.. noone gets fired from here for being incompetent. Unfortunately we have a few people in our group that are either incompetent, have attitudes that cause problems and get in the way.. or both mixed together. If I had any say, I could name 2 people in my group that should be fired on the spot.. but they're still here, a year plus later. It's mostly due to managers not wanting the mark of having fired someone from their group on their record.

One of the two is partly my fault too.. I admit it, me fooled me in the interview as well. I thought he knew his stuff, but it turns out he's a first class BS artist. I'm talking so good at BS that it's almost worth it to hear the guy talk in meetings with vendors and customers, because if you didn't know better, you'd think he held the whole team together and was the true brains of the organisation.