Does A Mean Boss Lower Productivity

From: How much does your relationship with your boss matter - April 2, 2012 (edited)

The bond between manager and employee is the prime predictor of (1) Daily productivity and (2) Retention

1. US companies lose $360 billion a year to lost productivity from employees who have poor relationships with their supervisors.

2. Employees with strong ties to their manager bring in more money than those with weak ties.

3. “My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.”

People who agreed were more productive, contributed more to profits, and were more likely to stay long-term.

4. Employees worked for two different supervisors on alternate days. They had good rapport with one but not the other.

On the days with the bad boss, their average blood pressure shot up.

A 15-year study found that employees who had a difficult relationship with their boss were 30% more likely to suffer from coronary heart disease.

But what about this?

Good companies are not wrong to be tough on employees.

From: Respect Employees: Be Tough On Them, Andrew O'Connell, Harvard Business Review, Nov 15, 2010 (edited)

If you wade through the recent research on employee mood and workplace performance, you find stark evidence that difficult environments often bring out the best in people.

People perform better at complex problem solving in what the researchers call "nasty" workplaces — environments that abound with negative feedback.

Research subjects in a "nice" work environment with lots of positive feedback are generally in better moods than their nasty-workplace counterparts, but they devote less time to complex tasks and get worse results.

And what about this?

From: Walter Isaacson Reveals 14 Leadership Lessons from Steve Jobs, March 26, 2012

Push for Perfection - Steve Jobs’s pursuit of perfection was a big part of why he was so successful.

Tolerate Only “A” Players - According to Jobs, being brutally honest (and frequently rude) was one of the ways he kept the “B players” from gaining a foothold at Apple.

Bend Reality - The people around Steve Jobs accomplished great things they themselves knew couldn’t be done — simply because Steve Jobs believed otherwise.

 

Comments

[Engineer Recruitment]

Your relationship with your boss and other staff members is a fundamental part of job satisfaction. Depending on the specific employee and exactly how bad the boss actually is could determine the impact on performance.