Abrasive Behavior at Work: When It’s Not Just a Personality Conflict
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It’s common to accept the abrasive behavior of someone in your workforce as just another cost of doing business. Especially if that person is in a leadership position or perceived as “too valuable” to ruffle any feathers, we’re expected to just let it slide no matter how toxic their behavior becomes.
This could be a big mistake. Choosing to avoid, excuse, or dismiss abrasive behavior in your organization is harmful — it erodes employee motivation, organizational productivity, and customer and stakeholder trust. For the individuals who are targeted? It can become a persistent, wearying, hopeless experience that leaches away their emotional and physical health, especially devastating during these days of stressful post-pandemic adjustment.
Abrasive behavior is costly
The authors of The Cost of Bad Behavior examined the toll that bad behavior can have on otherwise well-performing companies, finding that an astonishing 95% of Americans say they’ve experienced rudeness at work. Their research also revealed from employee responses that, as a result of disrespectful behavior:
48% intentionally decreased their work effort
47% intentionally decreased their time at work
38% intentionally decreased the quality of their work
63% lost work time avoiding the offender
66% said their performance declined
78% said their commitment to the organization declined
12% left their job because of the experience
How do I know we have a problem?
Our definition of abrasive behavior is any interpersonal behavior that causes emotional distress in others sufficient enough to impede their productivity or disrupt organizational functioning; personal interactions that are perceived to be disrespectful. It isn’t just a personality conflict — it’s a chronic pattern of disrespectful conduct.
Abrasive behaviors range from mildly wounding to severely disruptive. Important to know: In our client coaching work we see that the “milder” range of behaviors often persist and create more damage over time if there is no intervention. The longer the chronic behavior is allowed to continue, the more damage it inflicts.
Impact on the post-pandemic workplace
It’s no surprise that our mental health and wellness have taken a hit as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. “As business leaders, we’ve all witnessed the effects of mental health challenges in the workplace, and we may have experienced our own share of these challenges as well,” says Bill Goodwin writing for Forbes.com. Many people are stressed out and burned out...”
Our “sensitivity radar” may be working overtime to detect any signal of conflict or anxiety in our interpersonal relationships. The fishbowl effect of online meetings only make abrasive behavior even more pronounced.
As part of our work coaching abrasive leaders, we’ve developed a diagnostic tool to help determine if there’s an abrasive behavior situation that needs to be addressed by leadership, called the Abrasive Leader Diagnostic™ . It’s a confidential survey open to anyone to take (no personal information is collected), and we’ve found it to be a great tool especially for managers, HR pros as well as leaders who may wonder if they may be exhibiting abrasive behavior or being perceived negatively themselves.
Some of the behaviors listed in the survey are:
Shouting
Swearing at others
Name-calling
Public humiliation
Inappropriate sexual comments or behaviors
Throwing or hitting objects
These are warning signs for sure. However, abrasive behavior isn’t always so pronounced, and can take many forms beside face-to-face, such as written, phone or email communications or through social media — making the problem more difficult to detect unless it’s reported by the target or witness of the abusive behavior.
In order to ensure the wellbeing of a company’s most valuable asset — its people — it’s crucial for leadership to offer the option of reporting as part of their organizational culture and policy. The Abrasive Leader Diagnostic™ is a helpful tool to help collect that information, quantify and measure the nature of the problem.
The next best step
If all of this has you thinking that there might be a disruptive person or situation in your organization, you might be wondering whether it’s worth paying attention to. Consider the following questions:
If a member of your family worked in your organization, would you want them to be subjected to this behavior?
Is it in the abrasive leader’s best interest to be perceived this way?
Is it in the organization’s best interest to ignore the disruption and distress created by this leader?
Final thoughts: Employers have a responsibility to manage both performance and conduct, assuring the physical and psychological safety of their workforce. If you see an issue, you need to intervene.
When we join a company, partnership or team, our expectation is that everyone involved will exhibit professional behavior toward us and each other. Instead, it’s highly possible that we may become one of the more than 60 million adults in the United States who are affected in some way by bullying behavior at work.
What kind of behaviors are we talking about? Our definition is any interpersonal behavior that causes emotional distress in others sufficient enough to impede their productivity or disrupt organizational functioning. It isn’t just a personality conflict — it’s a chronic pattern of disrespectful behavior.