Meeting the Cognitive Needs of Your Boss?
Working for a difficult boss is a big challenge. Working for a bullying, abusive or aggressive boss can be a nightmare. Dealing with such difficult relationships is in fact a cognitive design problem. Toxic relationships are most often rooted in unmet cognitive (intellectual, affective, motivational, volitional) needs.
Discovering the unmet needs is the first step in designing a fix. A new article on Strategy+Business, The Real Reason Your Boss is a Bully, offers some interesting insight. They bypass the often quoted psychological needs of ambition and need to feel powerful to get to a much more widespread issue:
“In fact, the authors conclude that aggressive behavior on the part of managers is often the result of self-recognized incompetence; in other words, vindictive bosses may be in over their heads — and their feelings of inadequacy cause them to take out their frustrations on subordinates.”
This finding clearly outlines the aggressive manager’s unmet cognitive needs.
