Is your boss an arrogant jerk?

 

Workplace Arrogance is a common phenomenon in all organizations. Arrogance is one of those behavioral attribute that hampers workplace relationship development and causes uncomfortable climate, and negative toxic.

 Workplace Arrogance is a demeaning behavior which an individual exhibits in order to establish or demonstrate their superiority over others. This behavior affects the interpersonal relationships, causes increased stress in the employees, in addition to general occupational stress. Stress is the response to a stimulus or stimuli that causes unbalance in the physical and mental equilibrium. And Occupational Stress is the stress that arises due to the mismatch in the capabilities of the individual and that required to complete the work efficiently and effectively. It is so common that how many of us feel that we are better than our peers, almost 80% feel that way, and this is an illusory superiority, Dunning-Kruger effect is an extreme example of the more generic bias illusory superiority

 Actually there’s nothing inherently wrong with everyone being above average. After all, many individuals who had invested time, money and efforts towards their professional development. They weren’t typical of the industry…and in fact, it is highly believable that they are better than their peers in the industry.

However, a tool named WARS (Workplace Arrogance Scale) for measuring employee / manager arrogance introduced by Stanley Silverman and his colleagues from The University of Akron and Michigan State University.

The most important conclusion resulting from their research with WARS was that arrogant employees were usually less intelligent and skilled, although pretended to be superior to others. Their arrogance was thus completely unsubstantiated.

Arrogance turned out to prevail among employees with low self-esteem. This is typical behavior of trying to compensate the lack of confidence.

Silverman and his colleagues discovered less arrogant employees produced better results and vice versa. It became clear that excess arrogance is a significant obstacle for productive work.

Arrogant workers not only performed worse, but made it hard for the rest of the team to maintain friendly, cooperative relationships, at the same time ruining trust and respect.

Silverman’s study also shows that, if tolerated, arrogance can be a highly negative force, draining energy and motivation out of the others and making daily communication unbearable.

Identifying arrogant bosses and avoiding the headaches caused by them can be as simple as answering the below questions included in the WARS test.  A yes to any of the questions signals arrogance in bosses. 

• Does your boss put his/her personal agenda ahead of the organization's agenda?
• Does your boss demonstrate different behaviors with subordinates and supervisors?
• Does the boss discredit others' ideas during meetings and often make them look bad?
• Does your boss reject constructive feedback?
• Does the boss exaggerate his/her superiority and make others feel inferior?

Arrogant bosses often don’t give compliments and mostly condescending, they act like a weasel their concern only about their own neck, they don’t back the team when something goes wrong and they throw people to the wolves

However, encouraging teamwork and humility as well as cultivating a learning-focused culture can lower the degree of arrogance within an organization and contribute to mutually beneficial social interactions between employees and managers.

Now accepting that we all fall victim to the illusion superiority, here are few tips to use the knowledge of illusory superiority to your advantage

• Be actively realistic
• Respond by offering padding
• Embrace failure
• Assume improvement is possible and remember you are not above average in every category