Saler: Boorish behavior, in the workplace or the White House, comes with a high cost

In his classic book “Working,” Studs Terkel recalled an ad for a major pain reliever in which a pretend worker claimed to like his pretend job but lamented the pretend headaches it caused.

Fresh out of business school and anxious to make a difference at a company whose products she admired, Christine Porath soon began taking home more than a headache, something closer to disillusionment. Whether behind closed doors or in front of co-workers, Porath noticed that her bosses often treated subordinates rudely or with outright indifference.

“People felt disrespected and the top leader had a tendency to demean people, often publicly,” Porath told me in a phone interview. “It made them feel small, and it also affected the way they treated others, often unconsciously. I just felt like it was contagious in the way it spread from employees to clients and customers and co-workers.”

Porath recalls one boss telling a colleague, ”If I wanted your opinion, I’d ask for it.”

Over the next two decades, it was Porath who did the asking, checking with tens of thousands of workers across six continents about their treatment in the workplace. She found that 98 percent of workers experienced “uncivil” behavior at some point in their careers.

Based on a 1998 survey she conducted with Thunderbird School of Management professor Christine Pearson, one-quarter of respondents complained of being “treated rudely” at least once a week. When Porath, author of “Mastering Civility” and associate professor of management at Georgetown University, repeated the survey in 2011, that number had more than doubled.

Is incivility contagious? 

President Donald Trump has publicly berated members of his staff and cabinet, perhaps setting an example for other bosses to follow, consciously or not. To the extent that bullying is contagious, those demeaning tweets from the Oval Office (“VERY weak”) also could be impacting how Americans interact after they’ve punched out at work.

“One striking characteristic of human social interactions is unconscious mimicry; people have a tendency to take over each other’s posture, mannerisms and behaviors without awareness,” according to a study published in the “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.”

While emphasizing that she was not speaking about any specific person, Dana Kabat-Farr, an assistant professor of management at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, also sounded the alarm.

“We’ve always looked to our political and organizational leaders as people to set the norms and the expectations of behavior,” Kabat-Farr told me. “When you have a person who is extremely rude or disregards people’s feelings, it shows the model behavior and what’s acceptable. It does have the potential to change the norms.”

Bad behavior is costly 

Boorish behavior in the workplace comes at a high price.

In “Mastering Civility,” Porath writes that almost half of the 800 workers that she and Pearson surveyed intentionally decreased their effort on the job and more than three-quarters lessened their commitment to the organization if they felt disrespected. Over 500 billion workdays reportedly are lost due to job-related stress each year, and healthcare costs are estimated to be almost 50 percent higher among workers suffering from work-related stress. By the time she left her first job, Porath wrote, “many of us were husks of our former selves.”

In a speech last May to graduates at the Wharton School, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner confessed that early in his business career, he wasn’t a particularly helpful boss.

“I’d listen with the intent to reply, and not seek to understand,” Weiner recalled. “Over time, I realized how unproductive this approach was. Rather than inspire and lift people up, it was a good way to shut people down. So I decided to change.”

Drawing upon lessons from “The Art of Happiness,” — a book about the teachings of the Dalai Lama that he keeps close at hand — Weiner transformed himself into what he calls a compassionate boss.

“I can tell you with absolute conviction that managing compassionately is not just a better way to build a team, it’s a better way to build a company.”

According to the poet Maya Angelou, there’s a reason for that.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did,” Angelou once wrote, “but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Tom Saler is an author and freelance journalist in Madison. He can be reached at tomsaler.com.