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Let's hope this businessman isn't yelling at an employee. A recent Ohio State University study found that employees who gave it right back to hostile bosses experienced less psychological distress, more job satisfaction and more of a commitment to their employer

(The Plain Dealer, file photo)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - There your boss goes again: berating, belittling and barking orders at subordinates.

What's an employee to do?

Don't be a pushover. Dish it right back, says a recent study by an Ohio State University professor.

"The best situation is certainly when there is no hostility in the workplace," said Bennett Tepper, lead author of the study and a professor of management and human resources at OSU's Fisher College of Business. "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."

They also had less psychological distress, better job satisfaction and greater loyalty toward employers, according to the study recently published in the journal "Personnel Psychology".

The study focused on passive-aggressive responses employees directed at managers, who had targeted them for abusive behavior. When bosses did things such as yelling, ridiculing, intimidating or engaging in other hostilities, these employees didn't just take it. They pushed back by doing such things as ignoring their bosses, acting like they didn't know what their bosses were talking about or gossiping about them.

Academic studies refer to this as engaging in negative reciprocity. In everyday life, it is better know by such expressions as fighting fire with fire, offering tit for tat or giving them a dose of their own medicine.

"If you reciprocate bad behavior, there is actually this upside to it," Tepper said. "It makes you feel better about yourself. You feel less like a victim.

"At a more societal level, we kind of believe that you don't take crap, if you will, from another person," he said. "The belief is that this has a stabilizing effect on society. If people know they are going to get it back, when they give it, then it is supposed to curb their behavior in some way."

Tepper cautioned that he, and the study's other authors, are not encouraging people to engage in passive-aggressive behaviors, which are generally considered to be counterproductive. He said the study could only draw conclusions about passive-aggressive behaviors because they were the only ones being examined.

"What needs to be done, and what we are working on now, is a comparison between hostility as a way of responding, versus forgiveness as a way of responding or acceptance as a way of responding," he said. "These are strategies that we know seem to work in other kinds of contexts that seem to be good for people.

"There are other things that people do that psychologically might be more effective, and I would want to rule them out before I advise anyone to engage in a passive-aggressive way against their boss," Tepper said.

But for now, if your boss yells at you, you can cite research if you decide to respond in a passive-aggressive way. If gossiping about the boss doesn't work, perhaps you could choose to perform some of your work duties in a half-hearted way.

In giving it right back to the boss, employees didn't see themselves as victims, even though they had been targets of hostility.

"It is that absence of victim identity that in turn leads to more positive kinds of outcomes," he said.

Workers who returned the retaliation were less prone to having negative feelings associated with work than colleagues who didn't give it back to the boss. But did the careers of these feisty employees suffer? Tepper said employees who engaged in negative reciprocity didn't believe their actions had harmed their careers.

Even though their careers remained in tact, it didn't mean that employees' pushing back changed their bosses' hostile behavior.

"If there was a change, there tended to be a slight decrease in the amount of abusiveness of bosses if their employees were more hostile," Tepper said.

For about 15 years, he has been studying the effects abusive bosses have on employees. Among Tepper's findings, from other studies, is that people who are abused by their bosses are more likely to be abusive toward their own family members. While it is commonly believed that workers take out frustrations on their families that they can't take out on their abusive bosses, he and his colleagues found otherwise.

"It is actually sort of affecting their emotional state," he said of bosses' abusive behavior.

"It kind of wears them out; and that makes it more likely that they will engage in these negative behaviors toward their family members," Tepper said.

Other research Tepper did found that bosses who were mistreated by higher-ups were more apt to mistreat their employees. He and his colleagues also found that most abusive bosses don't randomly mistreat subordinates.

"We have found that bosses who are prone to be abusive toward their employees, don't necessarily abuse all of them," Tepper said. "They tend to pick and choose targets very carefully. They go after ones who come across as weak and vulnerable, and they go after ones who seem kind of ornery or just unlikeable."

None of his research done since the Great Recession looked at what role - if any - the economic downturn has had on workplace hostility. Many employers still have not restored staffing to pre-recession levels, so many workers and managers find themselves with heavy workloads. Lower staffing levels often leads to power being concentrated among fewer managers. Hostile bosses are prone to be even more hostile when they have more power, Tepper said.

"The old adage that power corrupts is borne out in lots of research on the effects of interpersonal power," he said. "I would absolutely hypothesize that as the economy got worse, and people had fewer options for job mobility, they sort of became more economically dependent on their bosses. Their bosses now have a lot more power, so you are going to see a lot more abusive behavior. That is just a hypothesis."

The research on passive-aggressive behavior included two studies. The first, based on two mail surveys completed by 169 people, focused on hostility exhibited by supervisors and their employees' reaction to such behavior. The second was an online survey of 371 people, who were surveyed three times. It was designed to determine why employees felt better if they returned the retaliation bosses had directed at them.

Tepper conducted the research with Marie Mitchell of the University of Georgia, Dana Haggard of Missouri State University, Ho Kwong Kwan of the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and Heeman Park of Ohio State.