Twenty years ago, the American psychologist Tessa West began arriving early to the department store at which she worked, so she could avoid the salespeople she spent most of her time with. Really, she was hoping to escape just one colleague – someone with whom she disagreed about shop-floor etiquette. (Her: don’t steal clients. The co-worker: why not?) In the early mornings, West could be sure they wouldn’t run into each other, saving her from stress and anxiety, which can lead to ill health. “It’s not that I thought anything bad was going to happen,” she recalls, via Zoom. “It was the not-knowing what would happen,” and “the increase in heart-rate” that comes with that uncertainty. Soon the situation became so preoccupying that West quit, not so much resolving the conflict as bypassing it altogether. “Did it work? Sure. But how much energy did that take up? A lot.”
West, who is now 40, is a professor of psychology at New York University, where she runs the West Interpersonal Perception Lab, a research unit that studies, broadly, how we deal with each other, and how those interactions affect our mental and physiological states. “I spent the first 10 years of my career doing basic science on how people communicate,” she says, which included “a lot of time in labs evoking horrible experiences to see what people do.” (One study involved West sitting participants in a chair and “being mean” to them, to measure their stress responses.) Before long, she noticed that a lot of what she was observing could be captured in the workplace: how individuals influence groups, how status affects persuasion and morale, how anxiety affects everyday relations. And the more she researched, the more she realised that, like her younger self, very few of us know how to resolve everyday conflict at work.
“Like, I don’t know,” she says. “Did you ever take a course to learn what to do when someone’s being a low-level asshole?”
West and I are meeting to discuss Jerks at Work, her new book, in which she explains the types of bad colleagues we encounter in the workplace, and attempts to equip readers with strategies to mend disputes. “Most of us have worked with someone who had an outsized effect on our emotional wellbeing,” she writes. “To cope, we’ve tried a few tactics: venting to friends, disengaging from the social scene at work, gossiping about the person in the hopes our bosses will learn – via the grapevine – just how miserable we are.” None of this tends to help. Typically, neither does the alternative, retaliating through confrontation, which often “ends in more conflict, since most people don’t enjoy having their flaws spelled out to them in excruciating detail.” Sometimes we think of the ability to argue as displaying superiority or courage, and not a worrying volatility and lack of emotional control.
West argues we’re all capable of being poor colleagues. A lot of workjerkery is rooted in innate feelings and behaviours: laziness, jealousy, the various emotional fissures we experience in marriages, repackaged for office life. (On needling pettiness at work, one recent viral tweet read: “The feeling of forwarding an email you have been accused of not sending is probably the same as winning a duel.”) We all have our embarrassing weaknesses – we can all be jerks. “Some of us get overwhelmed, so we ghost people, do a disappearing act. At work, those folks are more likely to be free-riders, or neglectful bosses. Others get anxious, so they micromanage.” Problems arise whenever a group works together. “I’ve seen Nobel laureates act the same way in meetings that I saw on the shop floor,” West says. Tantrums, attacks on reputation, hotshot egos, credit stealing, microagression, passive aggression, conniving attempts to get ahead… it affects us deeply. Once, when West was tasked with re-arranging her faculty’s office plan, she faced kickback from colleagues upset at the changes. “People would come to me in private and say, ‘There’s no way I can share a wall with this person.’ They cared more about that – how many feet away from their nemesis they were – than whether or not they got promoted.” She later caught a co-worker “walking down the hall with a two-gallon bottle of water that was clearly full of urine.” West realised he was pissing in his office to avoid bumping into a colleague in the toilet.
All of this would be amusing if it weren’t so damaging. “A lot of us worry about acute stressors – those big life events, when we can physically feel our hearts racing and our palms sweating,” West says. “But the biggest predictor of health outcomes is daily, low-level stuff.” Incessant stress sustained for three to five days is enough to affect your immune system, making you more susceptible to mild illnesses, like colds. As that stress cascades over years, studies have shown scarier problems to emerge: obesity, impotence, cancer, high blood pressure, heart disease. “If you’re feeling butterflies in your stomach because you know you’re going to run into someone who’s going to say something rude…” West says. “That adds up.”
In a 2014 study, West asked parents to deliver a talk to strangers, an experience known to induce anxiety, and then had them sit with their children, all of whom were between six and 12 months old. “We found that the babies showed physiological alignment with their parents’ stress responses,” West says. “If a mum had an elevated heart rate, the baby caught that stress.” (This kind of emotional transference can be termed stress contagion.) “And if you told the mum to try to regulate it, to push it down, the effect was even worse,” she continues. “So if you get really stressed with your boss at work and you try to suppress it, if you don’t talk about it with your family, if you think that that’s going to solve it…” She shakes her head. “Doesn’t. Work. It leaks out of you through all of these non-verbal communication channels. You show it in your face. You sigh. And your family becomes attuned. It affects your relationships with them. But it also affects their physiology. Their stress. In their bodies.” She looks concerned. “That part is terrifying, that if you don’t solve your problems at work, your kids are going to suffer, your spouse is going to suffer, in ways you don’t even realise.”
It is likely you’ve had bad colleagues. It is also likely you’ve had a bad boss. Everyone has a story – don’t you? Perhaps it involves micromanagement, or neglect, or small acts of soul-crushing criticism, or larger harassment and abuse. Perhaps the malevolence was overt. Perhaps it was more subtle, so that if you were to later describe it to friends it would seem minor and inconsequential, and you might come off as appearing hypersensitive. (This is true of so much workplace conflict; often a jerk is a jerk for a series of small, collective actions, not for one colossally atrocious deed.) Sometimes, bosses don’t realise the effect they’re having on workers, and it is helpful to remain modest about their levels of self-awareness. An acquaintance recently told me she “once had a female boss who did all of the following in an open-plan office, in front of both male and female colleagues:
1. Asked me what menstrual products I used.
2. Asked me what bra size I wore.
3. Asked me when I was planning to have children.
4. Told me off for asking ‘How was your weekend?’ on a Monday morning, because she didn’t like personal questions.”
Often, managers become managers for one of two reasons: they had excelled at their previous job, or they had drifted around an organisation long enough for higher-ups to finally announce, “OK, it is time.” Frequently, a manager has no experience of managing people before they are required to, which can be disastrous. “Very few managers are trained,” West says. (Sometimes it is because their managers weren’t trained.) “And if you get so far up at work and you still suck at this, it’s a bit embarrassing. You don’t like to admit it. It’s like a dark secret… Once you get to a certain career stage, it feels patronising to take a ‘How to Get Along with Others’ class.” In the book, she writes, “A lot of jerk at work problems result from poor leadership” – it is up to a manager to transform an undermined or eroded culture.
In West’s view, we undervalue how much communication affects the workplace, and she is riled by the fact this learnable skill is rarely taught. Why aren’t workers mandatorily coached in conflict management? she wonders. Why, during interviews, is our focus on bottom-line productivity rather than how well they might function within a larger whole? “There are some basic skills,” West says, of bosses, “like how to check in on a team to make sure no one is free-riding; how not to enable people who kiss up and kick down. Little things managers should do, they’re simple, they don’t require charisma or mind-reading or magical empathy or any of those kinds of soft skills – they just require small changes in behaviour. Obvious shit, really. But so many of us don’t do it because nobody told us to.”
The lasting shift to remote work brought on by the pandemic has been kind to jerks in some ways and terrible in others. Colleagues who once benefited from the slippery, informal workplace conversations that were allowed to occur in office environments have been hampered by Zoom calls, which involve structure and multiple attendees – it is difficult to bitch about a colleague if your target is with you on-screen. But others have thrived. With physical distance, it has become easier for neglectful bosses to neglect. (West: “Bosses should never assume no news is good news.”) At home, shirkers shirk, and micromanagers send emails around the clock, because what does the pandemic workday look like any more? Recently, West attended a department video conference in which she says one colleague – a bulldozer digitally, if not in person – dominated by yelling, so that he appeared on screen more than anyone else, making it difficult for the meeting’s organiser to interrupt and increasing his chances of getting his own way.
The Zoom problem (which, remarkably at this stage of working-from-home, remains a common organisational issue) is easily fixed: never use Speaker View, which a single participant can monopolise, and instead break the screen up into a grid, so more voices can be heard. (This is a strategy West describes as “controlling the spotlight”.) Other conflicts are trickier to resolve, though they nearly always involve similarly simple actions. In Jerks at Work, West helps readers understand that a poor office situation isn’t futile – that no matter how constantly unsettled you might feel, there is always a move to make. For micromanagers, she suggests: “Set mutually agreed upon expectations.” For bulldozers: learn to speak first in meetings, and jettison their dominance. For the co-worker on a campaign of terror: create physical and psychological buffers, so as to lessen interaction and anxiety.
Much of West’s book leads to the fact that if a colleague is being a jerk to you, it is likely they are being a jerk to other people, too. To this end, West suggests developing a broad network within your organisation – not friends so much as distant contacts with social capital, who, via inter-departmental awareness, might help identify troublemakers. This needn’t be the CEO, because who, really, can reach the CEO?
“I’m the only faculty member here who invites the IT department to my Christmas parties,” West says. “People think it’s weird. I’m like, ‘What are you talking about? They’re the most socially savvy people here!”
West has worked at NYU for 14 years, and has been a tenured professor for seven. At the end of our conversation, I ask if she has problems at work now, half-expecting the answer to be no, perhaps naively, faintly hopeful.
“Yes,” she says. “Many.”
“It’s still tough?” I ask.
“Of course,” she says. Then she laughs, and adds, “Just like any other skill, it needs practice.”
How to spot a work jerk
There are seven types to look out for. Are you one of them?
Kiss up/kick downers ‘These are people who climb to the top by any means necessary,’ writes Tessa West. They tend to be competitive with colleagues at their level and below, reserving good manners only for bosses and people above them.
Credit stealers ‘They seem like friends, but they will betray your trust if your idea is good enough to steal.’ This could involve offering to help in the early stages of a project, only to claim it as their work later.
Bulldozers ‘Workers who take over the process of group decision-making and render bosses powerless to stop them through fear and intimidation.’ Often they don’t mind making a fuss to get what they want. Don’t mistake their behaviour for leadership.
Free riders People who are ‘experts at doing nothing, and getting rewarded for it’. They take on work that seems important but requires little effort.
Micromanagers Co-workers who email you at all times of the day. ‘Some do it because they used to have your job and are having a hard time moving on, others because they’re under the false impression that more monitoring equals better performance.’
Neglectful bosses These are managers who follow a three-step process: periods of neglect, a buildup of worry, ‘a surge of control over you to alleviate their anxiety’.
If you have a neglectful boss, ‘you will live in a world of chronic uncertainty.’
Gaslighters ‘These workers lie with the intent of deceiving on a grand scale.’ They often isolate victims to get what they want.
Jerks at Work: Toxic Co-workers and What to do About Them by Tessa West is published by Ebury Edge at £11.99
