Inside the Mind of the Modern American Boss -- New York Ma...

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Boss Science
The psychopathology of the modern American corporate leader.
By Steve Fishman Published Oct 25, 2007

P

ossibly, your boss is a truly fine person—wise, kind, perceptive,

capable, understanding, the all-seeing director of the office sitcom, the sort of individual one might like to have, in an ideal world, as a parent or a confidant. Or not. In the real world, bosses are known to suffer from a long list of social pathologies: naked aggression, credit hogging, micromanaging, bullying, you
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name it. According to one report, 60 to 75 percent of employees—it doesn’t

matter the organization—say the worst aspect of their job is their boss. It’s not difficult to believe, as one office expert concludes, that “every employed adult will have to work for a bad boss for some significant period.” In the natural world, there are brutal processes by which, say, one especially vicious bull walrus ends up on the rock, with all the females, while all the others are forced to skulk around the periphery. Dogs, we’re told, inevitably select a leader, who emerges naturally through some mysterious language of dominance rituals, reinforced with tactical urination. Could the same be true, somehow, in the world of work? Is there some law of office life that dictates that jerks rise to the top? In search of an answer, I began to explore the vast and ever-growing field of office psychology. The field is packed with off-the-top-of-their-head pundits and latest-idea peddlers of all stripes. Sprinkled among these are a few thinkers and scientists. One of them is Seymour Adler, an industrial-organizational psychologist at Aon Consulting. Adler is tall, talkative, and unassuming; he wears large glasses, khakis, a shirt without a tie. He has