Bosses who feel incompetent are more likely to bully subordinates, according to a study being published in the journal Psychological Science.

In a paper titled "When the Boss Feels Inadequate," psychologists Serena Chen of UC Berkeley and Nathanael Fast of the University of Southern California argue that leaders who are in over their heads tend to resort to browbeating to protect their egos.

"If people feel incompetent and they happen to be in a high-powered position, that's when the aggression kicks in," Fast said. "Power has its downsides. It elevates the standards by which people are judged and can make them less secure to the degree they feel inadequate."

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In four psychological experiments performed on 410 volunteers, mostly drawn from real workplaces, the authors showed how boosting the self-esteem of an insecure boss should lessen overbearing behavior.

"Make them feel good about themselves in some way," Chen said, suggesting this might mean complimenting a hobby or nonwork activity provided it is "something plausible that doesn't sound like you're sucking up."

Citing a survey commissioned by the Workplace Bullying Institute, an advocacy group that tracks the issue, the authors estimate that more than one-third of all employees have been sabotaged, yelled at or belittled by a supervisor.

The Institute, which maintains a Web site (links.sfgate.com/ZIJF) to help bullied workers cope, argued in a recent opinion article that the phenomena has gotten worse during the recession because it's harder for employees to get out from under a bad boss' thumb.

The research paper by the two psychologists focused on the narrow issue of linking a boss' self-perception of incompetence to domineering behavior.

The researchers did not actually observe workplaces but rather asked volunteers - mainly working people ranging from secretaries to managers - whether they were high or low in the pecking order and how secure they felt about their job performance, and ranked them with questionnaires and exercises designed to measure aggressive tendencies and behaviors.

One experiment put subjects in a role that allowed them to act in a bullying manner, by supposedly setting the volume on a buzzer that would ring if an imaginary subordinate gave a wrong answer to some made-up questions. Fast said the experiment was designed to determine whether people with a sense of power, coupled with feelings of inadequacy, set the volumes louder, which turned out to be the case.

"They took out their feelings of threat on someone else," he said.

Another experiment showed that volunteers with high power but low confidence were nicer after writing about something that made them feel good. It didn't matter whether they wrote about their kids or their cats; if it made them feel better, potential bullies were less aggressive, Fast said.

Chen said their conclusion was that workplace bullying grew out of a sense of insecurity. "Our data suggest it's ultimately about self-worth," she said.