Sometimes it is Okay to Ignore Your Boss

While most of us have been trained to never retaliate against a supervisor, a new study suggests a passive-aggressive response may be beneficial for some circumstances.

Ohio State researchers found that employees who had hostile bosses were better off on several measures if they returned the hostility.

The study found that giving it back to a boss allowed the employee to feel less like a victim. This, in turn, resulted in less psychological distress, more job satisfaction and more commitment to their employer.

“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 a professor of management and human resources.

“The best situation is certainly when there is no hostility. But if your boss is hostile, there appears to be benefits to reciprocating. Employees felt better about themselves because they didn’t just sit back and take the abuse.”

Hostile bosses were ones who did things like yell at, ridicule, and intimidate their workers. Employees who returned hostility did it by ignoring their boss, acting like they didn’t know what their bosses were talking about, and giving just half-hearted effort.

“These are things that bosses don’t like and that fit the definition of hostility, but in a passive-aggressive form,” Tepper said. “I expect that you don’t have too many employees yelling and screaming at their bosses.”

The research involved data from two related studies that the researchers conducted. Study findings have been published online in the journal Personnel Psychology.

The first study included 169 people who completed two surveys by mail, seven months apart.

In the first survey, the respondents completed a 15-item measure of supervisor hostility developed by Tepper in 2000. It asked participants to rate how often their