Being in an abusive workplace has negative effects in multiple ways. One possible example, as we have discussed, is fear. People are afraid to speak up and so behavior that is illegal, abusive, immoral and just plain wrong occurs in the presence of many silent by-standers. According to Goleman, anger occurs often when a person feels threatened. Usually in the work place, it is not being physically threatened but rather threats to your job or your self-esteem.
Think about being in a work situation where your boss is yelling at you, swearing, making threats.
How easy is it for you to concentrate on something else while you are angry? In an unethical work place, anger distracts people from getting the job done. After such a tirade, how motivated do you feel to perform your best?
Managers who think they can scare people into good performance are fooling themselves.
Not only may such treatment cause the employees you have to work less productively, it may lose you the best employees altogether. Dr. De Mars tells this story:
"I once quit a job during orientation. They had hired several new faculty members and they were having orientation on a Saturday. Even though we were not getting paid to work Saturday, most of the new employees showed up, excited to be starting their new position. The Dean began by berating all of the people who came late. These individuals showed up from five to fifteen minutes late for an all-day meeting. He gave a long speech about how it made them look unprofessional.You could see by the looks on their faces how it made them feel. During the day we went through a number of exercises related to college teaching, creating a syllabus, fair grading practices. At the end of the day, he called me at home and said that they thought my qualifications were great but my appearance needed a little work. He proceeded to tell me, in a very calm tone of voice, that I needed to wear a business suit every day, get a hair cut, get new shoes and change my appearance to fit their professional image. At the end of it, he asked me, politely, did I think I could comply with that. When I told him, equally politely, that I didn't think so, and that I had decided to accept another job offer I had instead, he was stunned. My concern about this institution was that they seemed to value compliance more than competence. I'm not the most intuitive person in the world, but it just sent up a warning signal to me. A few years later, the institution was fined millions of dollars for violating federal regulations."