Is the ‘Bad Boss’ Syndrome a significant problem in our industry? | By Enda Larkin

'Bad bosses can damage your health.' The headline jumped from the page, immediately catching my attention. I had always known that working for a poor leader can be frustrating, or worse still, painful for those at the receiving end of their ineptitude. Now, an increasing body of research suggests that prolonged exposure to them can actually lead to negative and lasting health impacts. This particular headline referred to a study by a Swedish team of researchers published in the Occupational and Environmental Medicine Journal which found a strong link between poor leadership and the risk of serious heart disease and heart attacks among more than 3,000 employed men.

Who would have guessed it, eh? All the times that I have heard people saying things like 'my boss makes me sick': turns out they were actually right! And the findings of this particular research indicate that the harmful effects of poor leadership may be cumulative - the risk goes up the longer an employee worked for the same company. In the words of the lead author of the study, Anna Nyberg, a psychologist at Karolinska Institute's Department of Public Health Sciences in Stockholm, when it comes heart problems, 'If you have a good boss, you have at least a 20 percent lower risk and if you stay with your boss for four years, you have at least a 39 percent lower risk.' We put health warnings on cigarette packs; maybe it is time to start labelling bad bosses.

Okay, on the face of it, heart failure might seem like an extreme consequence resulting from bad leadership and it is easy to discount such studies as scaremongering. Actually, when I recently mentioned this particular piece of research to a group of hoteliers on a leadership programme, I was virtually laughed out of the room and many of those in attendance were quick to pooh-pooh the findings; damn lies and ridiculous statistics generated by people in woolly jumpers was the thrust of the argument against these relatively dramatic findings. Isn't it funny how quickly some people will discount solid evidence, or shoot the messenger just because it runs contrary to what they would like to believe? Anyway, like it or not, as we shall see there is plenty of research available which highlights other less dramatic, but cumulatively costly, effects of working for a bad boss.

Now, before I continue, I would like to make it absolutely clear that I want to be fair and balanced towards all hotel managers because they do make easy targets for criticism; it is hard for them to win sometimes – particularly in a people industry such as ours. Actually, when it comes to the blame game they are like sitting ducks, the proverbial fish in a barrel you might even say. So, my definition of a 'bad boss' in a hotel context is not someone who fails to keep the few grumblers, found in every hotel, happy; a couple of dissatisfied employees does not the bad boss make. Nor are they managers who do not meet all of the expectations of their employees all of the time. That is clearly an impossible task. They are also not those who get things wrong occasionally, or who are forced to take difficult decisions due to factors which employees do not understand. No, 'bad bosses' - to me at least - are individuals who continually and consistently underperform, displaying repetitive patterns of destructive behaviours. For them, getting it wrong is the rule not the exception and whilst there is naturally a scale of severity in terms of bad bosses, all of them negatively influence performance to some degree.

But, potentially how big a problem is the bad boss syndrome in our industry? Well, every one of us has at least one story to tell about a really bad boss we have had to face at some point in our working lives. For an unfortunate few, they could probably write a book on their experience, given the severity of what they encountered. But stories alone do not necessarily signify that there is a substantial bad boss problem in hotels. In fact, finding tangible evidence about the scale of the problem is difficult because, in the first instance, what constitutes a bad boss is open to some debate; one employee's worst nightmare may well be an acceptable leader to another. It is all very subjective indeed and based as much on personal opinion as it is on anything else.

Thankfully, and I mean this in the sense of having some data to work with, apart from the wealth of anecdotal evidence about bad bosses, there is a growing pool of respected international research which shows that a significant number of employees - at all levels and across all industries - are disillusioned with how they are managed. Unfortunately, this research is not solely based on hotels for, to my knowledge, there is no specific research on this subject in our industry. However, there must surely be correlations to be drawn from what these studies are finding.

One example of the research available is a comprehensive study recently conducted by Dr Anthony Erickson and Dr Ben Shaw from the Faculty of Business, Technology and Sustainable Development at Bond University in Australia. In this study, they sought to measure the nature of poor leadership in organizations generally, within defined parameters as to what actually constitutes a bad boss. From over 700 respondents, about one-third rated their bosses as failures. Clearly, this does not signify that all those leaders were bad bosses to the same degree; however, this ball-park figure of around 'one-third' has come up in quite a few of the studies that I have seen, so there seems to be a pattern there.

Indeed, my own practical experience as an employee, manager and consultant in our industry would tell me that the 30% figure is not that far off the mark in a hotel context; about one-third of the managers that I meet in hotels could be deemed 'bad bosses': those who consistently - and remember that word is key here - underperform and generate negative consequences by their actions or omissions. For sure, some may continually fall down only in particular aspects of how they manage, whereas there are others whose underperformance is so severe as to warrant them deserving of the description 'organizational terrorists'. Again, from personal experience, I would estimate those at the really damaging end of the scale as being somewhere around 5% of the managers I encounter.

Although the precise scale of the bad boss problem might be hard to quantify, and whether you agree with my one-third or 5% hypotheses is not really the important issue here. If this article gets you thinking about this important issue, then that's a goal achieved. What you shouldn't ignore though is the fact that the consequences of having even one bad boss in a hotel are substantial. For example, a study of over 700 employees working in a variety of jobs which was conducted by Professor Wayne Hochwarter from Florida State University and two of his doctoral students, found that, 'employees stuck in an abusive relationship experienced more exhaustion, job tension, nervousness, depressed mood and mistrust. They also were less likely to take on additional tasks, such as working longer or on weekends, and were generally less satisfied with their job. Also, employees were more likely to leave if involved in an abusive relationship than if dissatisfied with pay.'

Bad bosses, particularly those at the severe end of the scale sitting further up the corporate ladder, can be very destructive. On occasion, they might well make the numbers look good, so the collateral damage they cause gets swept under the carpet but that doesn't mean there aren't hidden costs attached to these characters. Although those costs may not always be easy to pinpoint, they are far from inconsequential when you factor in the aggregated expenses of reduced engagement, lost productivity, higher employee turnover (particularly the talented ones), increased recruitment costs, damaged customer relations and so on. I believe that if more time was devoted to quantifying those costs, the findings might well cause heart palpitations within the finance department.

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