The No Asshole Rule

Last updated
The No Asshole Rule.jpg
Author Robert I. Sutton
GenreBusiness
PublisherBusiness Plus
Publication date
February 22, 2007
Pages224
ISBN 978-0-446-52656-2
OCLC 154698708
650.1/3 22
LC Class HD58.7 .S935 2007

The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't is a book by Stanford professor Robert I. Sutton. He initially wrote an essay [1] for the Harvard Business Review , published in the breakthrough ideas for 2004. Following the essay, he received more than a thousand emails and testimonies. Among other reasons disclosed in another article [2] published at the Harvard Business Review , these letters led him to write the book, which sold over 115,000 copies and won the Quill Award for best business book in 2007. [3] [4] [5]

Contents

The theme of this book is that bullying behaviour in the workplace worsens morale and productivity. A rule is suggested to screen out the toxic staff—the no asshole rule. The author insists upon use of the word asshole since other words such as bully or jerk "do not convey the same degree of awfulness". [6] In terms of using the word in the book's title, he said "There's an emotional reaction to a dirty title. You have a choice between being offensive and being ignored." [7]

Recognition

Two tests are specified for recognition of the asshole: [8]

  1. After encountering the person, do people feel oppressed, humiliated or otherwise worse about themselves?
  2. Does the person target people who are less powerful than him/her?

Their unpleasant behaviours were catalogued by Sutton as The Dirty Dozen: [9]

  1. Insults
  2. Violation of personal space
  3. Unsolicited touching
  4. Threats
  5. Sarcasm
  6. Flames
  7. Humiliation
  8. Shaming
  9. Interruption
  10. Backbiting
  11. Glaring
  12. Snubbing

Sutton believes there is a difference between "temporary" assholes who might be having a bad moment or day and "certified" assholes who are "persistently nasty". He gives the example of when he sent a scornful email to a colleague because he wrongly believed she was trying to take an office away from his group. In this instance, he was acting like a temporary asshole and to be a certified asshole he would have to act like a jerk persistently. Famous bosses who Sutton cites as having weakened their position by bad behaviour include Al Dunlap and Michael Eisner. Sutton also identifies Hollywood boss Scott Rudin as an example of a certified asshole - Rudin has fired 250 personal assistants for reasons such as bringing him the wrong muffin. Sutton asserts that Rudin also qualifies as an asshole as his targets are less powerful than him and are left feeling humiliated. [8]

Sutton makes the caveat that while it is essential to screen for assholes, a company should not recruit "spineless wimps". He believes constructive arguments benefit firms and help workers come up with better ideas. Sutton cites the Intel co-founder Andy Grove as someone who believes workers should challenge each other's thoughts. Intel teaches employees "how to fight" and requires new employees to take classes in "constructive confrontation". [8]

Cost and damage

The necessity of the No Asshole Rule and the damage assholes do is discussed by Sutton. He relays Bennett Tepper's research on 712 employees. Many of these workers had bosses who would oppress and belittle them, and Tepper studied the effect these bosses had on them. After six months he found workers with abusive bosses "quit their jobs at accelerated rates, and those still trapped in their jobs suffered from less work and life satisfaction, reduced commitment to employers, and heightened depression, anxiety, and burnout." Sutton relays even minor things such as treating someone as invisible and giving nasty stares can accumulate and adversely affect someone's mental health. Sutton describes how assholes not only affect victims themselves but also the bystanders and witnesses that see and hear about the abuse. Co-workers, family members, and friends are among those who are negatively affected. One British study of more than seven hundred employees in the public sector found "73 percent of the witnesses to bullying incidents experienced increased stress and 44 percent worried about becoming targets themselves". This shows assholes can harm and lessen the productivity of not only their victims but everyone in the workplace. Sutton states the assholes themselves also suffer from their actions in the form of "career setbacks and, at times, humiliation." Even when these jerks do their jobs well they can still be fired. He cites the example of the Indiana Hoosiers coach Bob Knight who despite all his achievements was fired for repeatedly losing his temper. [8]

Sutton discusses the total cost of assholes or the 'TCA' for organizations. While it is impossible to calculate the exact TCA for an organization, Sutton believes it is instructive for companies to estimate how much assholes are costing them. Factors to consider include the number of hours managers and HR professionals devote to 'asshole management' and the costs of lost clients. Future legal costs resulting from lawsuits against assholes and the cost of recruiting and training new employees should also be considered. Researchers Charlotte Rayner and Loraleigh Keashly have used data based on studies in the UK to calculate a company's TCA. They estimate that "25 percent of bullying 'targets' and 20 percent of 'witnesses' leave their jobs, and that the 'average' bullying rate in the U.K. is 15 percent". This means if 25% of victims leave a company of 1,000 people the replacement cost is $20,000 and the annual replacement cost is $750,000. If 20% of victims leave and there is an average of two witnesses for each victim, the replacement cost is $1.2 million, and the total replacement cost is just shy of $2 million. A senior executive from Silicon Valley has previously calculated the cost of an employee Sutton calls Ethan. The expenses relating to Ethan's poor treatment of others totaled around $160,000, and his company deducted some of this money from his bonus. [8]

Case studies

Companies who are listed as having appropriate recruitment policies include Barclays Capital, Google, JetBlue, Men's Wearhouse, and IDEO. [8] [7] [10] IDEO offers jobs to candidates who have interned with the company before and have "demonstrated under real working conditions that they aren’t assholes". They advise candidates they have not previously worked with to have strong recommendations and to have taught in university classrooms. Every candidate at IDEO is also interviewed "by people who will be above, below, and alongside them, status-wise". This method ensures if one high up manager is an asshole that manager will not be able to hire more jerks. [8]

Sutton also stresses companies should mean what they say. While many companies have written versions of the no asshole rule, few entirely abide by them. A group of Sutton's students did a case study on a security company who said they value "respect for the individual, teamwork, and integrity". The study revealed in actuality the company was disrespectful to young analysts and treated them with mistrust. These analysts were top students from prestigious universities and were working at the company for a few years until they returned to school to get their MBAs. As a result of treating these employees poorly, the company had a low rate of return and had a hard time recruiting employees back when they finished school. [8]

Sutton discusses how to enforce the no asshole rule and gives the Men's Wearhouse and a Fortune 500 company as examples of businesses that have done this successfully. [8] The Men's Warehouse fired a selfish and difficult employee even though he was one of the company's most successful salespeople, and as a result, the total sale volume in the store increased. A CEO at a fortune 500 company evaluated employees and fired people on his 'hit list' over a period of two years. The firm benefited from firing these assholes as they have risen from the "middle of the pack" to one of the top firms in the industry. [8] A special chapter is also dedicated to "the virtues of assholes", in which Steve Jobs is discussed as a prime example. [11] [12]

Sutton advises companies to adopt the "one asshole rule". Sutton believes by having a couple of token jerks in a company, coworkers will observe their bad behavior and be more likely to do the right thing. He based his hypothesis on a series of studies on littering done by Robert Cialdini. In one trial of the study researchers spewed garbage and litter around a parking lot, and in a separate trial, they made sure the lot was spotless. They placed a flyer on a driver's windshield and observed what the driver did with that flyer. As part of the experiment half of the drivers encountered a researcher who picked up the flyer on their car and threw it on the ground. Watching this one driver litter affected the subject as "drivers who saw the 'norm violation' were less likely to throw their handbill into a clean parking lot (6 percent vs. 14 percent) but more likely to throw it into a messy lot (54 percent vs. 32 percent)". This study shows when one person is caught breaking a rule others are more likely to follow it whereas if everyone seems to be breaking the rule we are more likely to break it as well. Sutton has applied this theory to companies and believes they should each have a "reverse role model" to remind others of the wrong behavior. [8]

Frequency

The book argues that asshole behavior is rather common by citing various studies:

[A] survey of 800 employees found that 10% witnessed daily incivility on their jobs and 20% were direct targets of incivility at least once a week.... [A]nother study of workplace incivility among 216 Canadian white-collar workers ... found that approximately 25% witnessed incivility of some kind on the job every day and 50% reported being direct targets of incivility at least once a week. A host of other studies show that psychological abuse and bullying are common in other countries, including Austria, Australia, Canada, Germany, Finland, France, Ireland, and South Africa. A representative sample of Australian employees found that 35% reported being verbally abused by at least one coworker and 31% reported being verbally abused by at least one superior.... In the Third European Survey on Working Conditions, which was based on 21,500 face-to-face interviews with employees from countries of the European Union, 9% reported that they were exposed to persistent intimidation and bullying. [13]

The book also affirms that employees perceive "upward" nastiness – i.e. directed toward bosses – as the rarest form and occurring in only 1% of the cases, while perceived "downward" nastiness is estimated to account for 50%–80% of occurrences, with 20%–50% occurring among coworkers of roughly the same rank. [13]

Sequels

In 2010, Sutton published a sequel, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst, which provided guidance on being a good boss. [14] A follow-up book was released in 2017 called The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt. [15]

See also

Related Research Articles

Systemic bias is the inherent tendency of a process to support particular outcomes. The term generally refers to human systems such as institutions. Systemic bias is related to and overlaps conceptually with institutional bias and structural bias, and the terms are often used interchangeably.

Incivility is a general term for social behaviour lacking in civility or good manners, on a scale from rudeness or lack of respect for elders, to vandalism and hooliganism, through public drunkenness and threatening behaviour. The word "incivility" is derived from the Latin incivilis, meaning "not of a citizen".

Organizational behavior or organisational behaviour is the: "study of human behavior in organizational settings, the interface between human behavior and the organization, and the organization itself". Organizational behavioral research can be categorized in at least three ways:

Workplace bullying is a persistent pattern of mistreatment from others in the workplace that causes either physical or emotional harm. It can include such tactics as verbal, nonverbal, psychological, and physical abuse, as well as humiliation. This type of workplace aggression is particularly difficult because, unlike the typical school bully, workplace bullies often operate within the established rules and policies of their organization and their society. In the majority of cases, bullying in the workplace is reported as having been done by someone who has authority over the victim. However, bullies can also be peers, and rarely subordinates.

A toxic leader is a person who has responsibility for a group of people or an organization, and who abuses the leader–follower relationship by leaving the group or organization in a worse condition than it was in. Good and bad leadership styles can propagate downwards in an organisation, and there may therefore be little support to be gained by reporting toxic leadership upwards in the hierarchy.

A workplace is a location where someone works, for their employer or themselves, a place of employment. Such a place can range from a home office to a large office building or factory. For industrialized societies, the workplace is one of the most important social spaces other than the home, constituting "a central concept for several entities: the worker and [their] family, the employing organization, the customers of the organization, and the society as a whole". The development of new communication technologies has led to the development of the virtual workplace and remote work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert I. Sutton</span>

Robert I. Sutton is a professor of management science at the Stanford University School of Engineering and a researcher in the field of evidence-based management. He is a New York Times best-selling author.

Workplace aggression is a specific type of aggression which occurs in the workplace. Workplace aggression is any type of hostile behavior that occurs in the workplace. It can range from verbal insults and threats to physical violence, and it can occur between coworkers, supervisors, and subordinates. Common examples of workplace aggression include gossiping, bullying, intimidation, sabotage, sexual harassment, and physical violence. These behaviors can have serious consequences, including reduced productivity, increased stress, and decreased morale.

Gary Namie is a social psychologist and anti-workplace bullying activist. He is the co-founder and director of the Workplace Bullying Institute, and is widely regarded as North America's foremost authority on the topic of workplace bullying.

Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) is employee's behavior that goes against the legitimate interests of an organization. This behavior can harm the organization, other people within it, and other people and organizations outside it, including employers, other employees, suppliers, clients, patients and citizens. It has been proposed that a person-by-environment interaction (the relationship between a person's psychological and physical capacities and the demands placed on those capacities by the person's social and physical environment.) can be utilized to explain a variety of counterproductive behaviors. For instance, an employee who is high on trait anger is more likely to respond to a stressful incident at work with CWB.

Workplace incivility has been defined as low-intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm the target. Uncivil behaviors are characteristically rude and discourteous, displaying a lack of regard for others. The authors hypothesize there is an "incivility spiral" in the workplace made worse by "asymmetric global interaction".

Workplace harassment is the belittling or threatening behavior directed at an individual worker or a group of workers.

The nursing organization workplace has been identified as one in which workplace bullying occurs quite frequently. It is thought that relational aggression are relevant. Relational aggression has been studied amongst girls but rarely amongst adult women. According to a finding, 74% of the nurses, 100% of the anesthetists, and 80% of surgical technologists have experienced or witnessed uncivil behaviors like bullying by nursing faculty. There have been many incidents that have occurred throughout the past couple of years. OSHA, which stands for "Occupational Safety and Health Administration" stated that from 2011 to 2013, the United States healthcare workers experienced 15,000 to 20,000 significant injuries while in the workplace.

Bullying in academia is a form of workplace bullying which takes place at institutions of higher education, such as colleges and universities in a wide range of actions. It is believed to be common, although has not received as much attention from researchers as bullying in some other contexts. Academia is highly competitive and has a well defined hierarchy, with junior staff being particularly vulnerable. Although most universities have policies on workplace bullying, individual campuses develop and implement their own protocols. This often leaves victims with no recourse.

A “toxic workplace” is a colloquial metaphor used to describe a place of work, usually an office environment, that is marked by significant personal conflicts between those who work there. A toxic work environment has a negative impact on an organization's productivity and viability. This type of environment can be detrimental to both the effectiveness of the workplace and the well-being of its employees.

Abusive supervision is most commonly studied in the context of the workplace, although it can arise in other areas such as in the household and at school. "Abusive supervision has been investigated as an antecedent to negative subordinate workplace outcome." "Workplace violence has combination of situational and personal factors". The study that was conducted looked at the link between abusive supervision and different workplace events.

While psychopaths typically represent a very small percentage of workplace staff, the presence of psychopathy in the workplace, especially within senior management, can do enormous damage. Indeed, psychopaths are usually most present at higher levels of corporate structure, and their actions often cause a ripple effect throughout an organization, setting the tone for an entire corporate culture. Examples of detrimental effects include increased bullying, conflict, stress, staff turnover, absenteeism, and reduction in both productivity and social responsibility. Ethical standards of entire organisations can be badly damaged if a corporate psychopath is in charge. A 2017 UK study found that companies with leaders who show "psychopathic characteristics" destroy shareholder value, tending to have poor future returns on equity.

Workplace democracy is the application of democracy in various forms to the workplace, such as voting systems, debates, democratic structuring, due process, adversarial process, and systems of appeal. It can be implemented in a variety of ways, depending on the size, culture, and other variables of an organization.

Machiavellianism in the workplace is a concept studied by many organizational psychologists. Conceptualized originally by Richard Christie and Florence Geis, Machiavellianism refers to a psychological trait concept where individuals behave in a cold and duplicitous manner. It has in recent times been adapted and applied to the context of the workplace and organizations by many writers and academics.

Civility may denote orderly behavior and politeness. Historically, civility also meant training in the humanities.

References

  1. Sutton, Robert (2004-02-01). "More Trouble Than They're Worth (in Breakthrough Ideas for 2004)". Harvard Business Review. ISSN   0017-8012 . Retrieved 2021-02-24.
  2. Sutton, Robert (2007-03-17). "Why I Wrote The No Asshole Rule". Harvard Business Review. ISSN   0017-8012 . Retrieved 2021-02-24.
  3. James Brady (18 October 2007), "Books & Bucks", Forbes, archived from the original on January 24, 2013
  4. "MS&E prof's new book takes Quill Award", The Stanford Daily, 11 October 2007
  5. Gordon Noble (3 April 2008), Costing workplace bullying, Business Spectator
  6. Katherine Kizilos (19 February 2007), The kindness of strangers, The Age
  7. 1 2 Green, Hardy (19 March 2007). "How To Get Rid Of The, Uh, Jerks". Business Week .
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Robert I. Sutton (2008), The No Asshole Rule, Business Plus, ISBN   978-0-446-69820-7
  9. Robert Cipriano (2011), "No Jerks Allowed in This Department", Facilitating a Collegial Department in Higher Education, John Wiley and Sons, ISBN   978-1-118-10764-5
  10. David Siegfried (1 February 2007), "The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't", Booklist
  11. Tom McNichol (28 November 2011), "Be a Jerk: The Worst Business Lesson From the Steve Jobs Biography", The Atlantic
  12. Ben Austen (23 July 2012), "The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?", Wired
  13. 1 2 The No Asshole, pp. 22-23
  14. Sutton, Robert (2010), Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst, Hachette, ISBN   9780446558471
  15. Sutton, Robert (2017), The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, ISBN   978-1328695918