An article containing some ideas from The No Asshole Rule appeared in The McKinsey Quarterly some time ago and was summarized in The Economist.
This post is motivated by the question with which The Economist ends its little story: “If jerks cost firms so dearly, why are so many them employed?”
I think that it is a good question, and one that I have puzzled over a lot. To their point:
A study of American workers released in March found that 44 percent of Americans reported they have worked for an abusive boss. This study was conducted by the Reed Group for the Employment Law Alliance.
They surveyed a representative sample of 1,000 American adults within the past two weeks, which resulted in interviews with 534 workers.
Things are even worse in some occupations, notably medicine. A longitudinal study of nearly 3,000 medical students from 16 medical schools was just published in The British Medical Journal. Erica Frank and her colleagues at the Emory Medical School found that 42 percent of seniors reported being harassed by fellow students, professors, physicians, or patients; 84 percent reported they had been belittled and 40 percent reported being both harassed and belittled.
The full report is here. Similarly, a 2003 study of 461 nurses published in the journal of Orthopaedic Nursing found that 91 percent had experienced verbal abuse in the past month. Physicians were the most frequent source of such nastiness, but it also came from patients and their families, fellow nurses, and supervisors.
The No Asshole Rule suggests a few reasons why there are so many.
1. In our society, we value winners so much that, even if they are jerks, we tolerate, or even glorify, them because — so long as they keep making money or winning games — we think they are worth the trouble. Exhibit one is Coach Bob Knight and his long tenure at Indiana University. The administration didn’t have the courage to get rid of him because he won so many games, despite a history of atrocious behavior.
See this story and the associated 1997 video clip: It sure looks to me like he is choking the player. Knight brags that he “did it my way,” but I don’t want people doing things that way in my organization, no matter how great they “perform.”
