Bully Bosses are Idiots and it's a Scientific Fact.

[Adam692]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17984-its-official-your-bullying-boss-really-is-an-idiot.html

It's official: Your bullying boss really is an idiot

* 14:28 15 October 2009 by Ewen Callaway
* For similar stories, visit the The Human Brain Topic Guide

Got a bullying boss? Take solace in new research showing that leaders
who feel incompetent really do lash out at others to temper their own
inferiority.

"Power holders feel they need to be superior and competent. When they
don't feel they can show that legitimately, they'll show it by taking
people down a notch or two," says Nathanael Fast, a social
psychologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles,
who led a series of experiments to explore this effect.

In one, Fast and his colleague Serena Chen, who is at the University
of California, Berkeley, asked 90 men and women who had jobs to
complete online questionnaires about their aggressive tendencies and
perceived competence. The most aggressive of the lot tended to have
both high-power jobs and a chip on their shoulder, Fast and Chen
found.

To see if a bruised ego can actually cause aggression, the researchers
manipulated people's sense of power and self-worth by asking them to
write about occasions when they felt either empowered or impotent and
then either competent or incompetent. Previous research has suggested
that such essays cause a short-term bump or drop in feelings of power
and capability, Fast says.
Feel-bad factor

Next, Fast and Chen asked their volunteers to select a punishment to
be given to university students for wrong answers in a hypothetical
test of learning. Volunteers chose between horn sounds that ranged
from 10 decibels to a deafening 130 decibels.

The volunteers who felt the most incompetent and empowered picked the
loudest punishments – 71 decibels on average. Workers who felt up to
their jobs, selected far quieter punishments, between 55 and 62
decibels, as did those primed to feel incompetent yet powerless.

Flattery seems to temper the aggressive urges of insecure leaders.
When Fast and Chen coaxed the egos of these volunteers by praising
their leadership skills, their aggressive tendencies all but
disappeared. This is proof that leaders are aggressive because of a
hurt ego, not simply a threat to their power, Fast says.

This might also explain why leaders of organisations both big and
small surround themselves with yes-men and women, he says.

Blind flattery may not be the best solution for the 54 million US
citizens estimated to have experienced workplace bullying (PDF). But
easing leaders into new positions of power, or telling them that it's
natural to feel daunted, could prevent future outbursts, says Adam
Galinsky , a social psychologist at Northwestern University's Kellogg
School of Management in Evanston, Illinois.

Journal reference: Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1111/j.
1467-9280.2009.02452.x