(Published in Business Day – 28 January 2025)
Rudeness has been shown to have a damaging effect on both individual and team performance. So why has it become so popular?
What is the impact on impressionable minds of the success of Donald Trump at the polls and his dramatic impact in enforcing rapid change? He and the prominent business leaders expressing similar hubris have many imitators. It feels like the bullies are inheriting the earth.
In managing companies, is the lesson that bullying works, as in President Trump’s foreign policy? Is theft okay, as in stealing another country’s sovereign territory? Lying seems to have become the norm, as does preferring personal prejudice to scientific evidence in formulating policy. The way to consolidate support seems to be to denigrate anyone who dares express a different point of view or speak truth to power. And vindictiveness against past rivals is glorious.
Or so it seems. But none of that will stand against the eventual verdict of history. It is time to name the elephant in the room. The populist leaders today are taking humanity back many decades to a world red in tooth and claw. I don’t think we want to go there.
It’s not all the populists’ fault. They are right to react to an unjust, careless world order. The old establishment became complacent. The rich, powerful and educated became arrogant. They tilted the supposedly neutral rules of international order in their favour. The heirs to the post-war liberal world order have made “liberal” almost a swear word by allowing selfish economic exploitation to overshadow human dignity, equality and protection for the human rights of each person.
By accepting as normal a world of hideous inequality, violation of human dignity, disregard for the opinions of anyone who does not belong to our tribe, we are all responsible.
Few of us can do much about global government, but we can influence where we work. So let’s take care not to allow the wrong lesson to take root in our companies. Against the current flourishing of incivility is decades of evidence of the damaging effect of toxic bosses.
Let’s just take the comparatively benign matter of rudeness. A thorough study published last year in the Journal of Applied Psychology showed that encountering rudeness causes team members to become less prosocial and more pro-self, leading in turn to reduced sharing of information and workload, resulting in the team performing less well. In a medical setting rudeness proved to be life-threatening in that it led to wrong clinical options.
Apparently even witnessing rudeness can impair individuals’ working memory, reducing their ability to perform complex tasks. Rudeness stifles creativity. Employees in hostile environments are less likely to take risks or propose innovative solutions.
There are times when it is appropriate to abandon good manners and shout out orders. They include emergencies like a fire or introducing necessary change in a reluctant organisation. In the short term a military style of taking charge may be needed, but in the long term, violent dictatorship is relentlessly destructive – as autocrats from Hitler to Pol Pot to Idi Amin have illustrated. Those of the current crop of brilliantly flowering companies that have shallow roots in the generative soil of human dignity will fade.
Thuli Madonsela pointed out in a piece in City Press that social justice could be set back decades through current developments. I believe this depends on what lessons you and I take into our companies and communities.
What others do is never an excuse to do what we know to be wrong. So the solution cannot be an arms race of nastiness. In a most unsettling world, leaders of today should model a style that will leave our successors with something worth leading.
Jonathan Cook chairs Thornhill Associates.