A health-care study by Amy Edmonson (one of many she's led on fear and silence in the workplace), examined the error rate in eight different nursing units, and looked for a correlation between the number of errors and the style of leadership. The hypothesis was that units with aggressive, intimidating leaders would produce more mistakes, while the units with enlightened, supportive leaders would make less.The researchers were shocked to find that the units with the best leadership (enlightened and supportive) reported TEN TIMES as many errors as in the more fear-based units. The bullying worked - aggressively holding people accountable for their errors resulted in one-tenth the number of errors! Hooray!
Unfortunately, if you'd like to use this evidence to justify your evil-boss philosophy, you're out of luck. The research also showed that, in the units with more aggressive leaders, people were scared to report any errors because they knew they'd be criticized, belittled, and humiliated. So, they only reported errors if they absolutely couldn't avoid it. In the supportive units, nurses felt free to report mistakes, with a common focus on finding root causes and improving patient safety. So, they reported all errors, without filtering them to protect themselves.
So, the numbers were dramatically better in the units with nasty, intimidating supervisors. But the numbers did not reflect reality. The numbers in the units ruled by fear, were distorted by that fear, distorted to minimize the exposure to the supervisor's wrath.
There is ample evidence to show that supportive, positive leadership produces better results. That a more civilized workplace produced better results. But if you don't care so much about results, and just want better measurements, you might try being an aggressive, bullying, fear-based, nasty, intimidating boss.
For more on this, check out The No Asshole Rule
by Robert Sutton, a quick read that led me to this interesting and revealing research.
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