The Truth About Why Your Colleagues Are Being Cruel (It’s Not Stress) | Ep 9
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Someone in your organisation is unpleasant in small ways, and it's worst on the quiet days. You know the rough shape of it. The analyst who spends a slow fortnight reading out other people's spelling mistakes in the team channel, with a row of laughing faces underneath. The supervisor who moves the same two people to the worst shift, each time with the reason that would survive a formal complaint.
Or the partner who arranges an associate's feedback, so the worst comment is the last one they read. Nobody has complained. Each instance on its own is too small to complain about, and complaining would make you look worse than them. And every one of those people is perfectly civil during the weeks when there's lots of work and everyone is busy.
That last part is the tell that almost nobody notices. Thank Here's what it costs you. People start to avoid that person. Work slows down in ways nobody notes in a report. Somebody starts taking random single days of leave, and the best explanation anybody can offer is, they're just like that. You try telling them how it makes people feel, nothing changes.
In the next 20 minutes, I'm going to show you why that conversation fails, and what the evidence says works instead. This isn't a personality problem you're going to solve by understanding somebody better. It's two things about the situation they're standing in, and both of them are owned by whoever is in charge of that situational work environment.
I'm Dr Nick Kecker. I'm an organisational psychologist, and I've spent over 25 years in boardrooms and senior leadership roles in all kinds of different organisations, large and small. This is what the research says. I'm The technical name for the trait we're discussing in this episode is everyday sadism.
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First let me take some of the stigma out of that term. What everyday sadism means is harm performed to others because performing that harm is enjoyable for the person doing it. That cruelty isn't triggered by the person not getting their way or because they're angry, but because the enjoyment of the act of cruelty is itself the driver.
Because everyday sadism is a personality trait, it sits on a scale from low to high that everybody sits on somewhere, in the same way that everybody sits somewhere on a scale of how organised they are. Luckily most people sit near the bottom of the everyday sadism scale and almost nobody sits at the high extreme.
As everyday sadism is a personality trait rather than a clinical condition, this video isn't a clinical diagnosis. It also has nothing at all to do with the sexual literature that shares part of its name. The field's own reviewers separate those two explicitly, so everything associated with that is packaging.
Here's the thing. People in the general population can be cruel more readily than you would imagine. In the study that first named this trait, participants were offered four unpleasant laboratory jobs. Just over a quarter of them volunteered to kill bugs in what looked like a coffee grinder. A quarter more volunteered to help them.
These were students, not monsters. The reason the everyday version matters is that the more dramatic version of sadism makes you imagine a monster. Instead, what the research describes is considerably more ordinary than that, and a lot more common than you'd think. But, we Before we go on, here are four things everyday sadism sometimes gets confused with.
The most common mistake in this territory isn't missing cruelty, it's labelling something as cruelty that's actually something else. The first is anger. Anger has a target with a history. It arrives after something rather than out of nowhere, and the person will usually tell you why if you ask. The second is overload.
Somebody with nothing left becomes curt, and overload is abrupt, not elaborate. That matters, because the fix for a bored person and the fix for an overwhelmed person are complete opposites. The third is bluntness. The colleague who's always been direct is direct with everyone, including the CEO. The bluntness does not choose who it's aimed at.
The fourth is strategy. Some people harm colleagues deliberately to get a job or remove a rival, and this strategy stops once they've won. The pattern I'm describing gains the person nothing. That's the test. There's a fifth line, and it's a different kind of line. This isn't sadistic personality disorder, which came out of the main diagnostic manual decades ago and is a matter for qualified clinicians.
A personality questionnaire score isn't a diagnosis, neither is an unqualified observation. The So, if it's not a monster and it's not anger, what actually makes it happen? The answer is what this video is about. It's two things about the situation, rather than one thing about the person. The first is about cognitive load and how much else there is to do.
Not how busy the person is, how much else there is to do that's stimulating in some way and worth doing. The second is what the act costs a person doing it. Not what it costs a target, which is usually a great deal. What it costs the everyday sadist, in seconds, in effort, in the risk of anybody noticing.
Both of those belong to somebody. Somebody decided how much empty attention exists in your week. Somebody decided whether a colleague can be moved off a rotor by a notification, with no name and no reason attached. Nobody thinks of either of those as a decision about cruelty. On the evidence, both of them are.
The rest of this episode is what the research does to those two dials, and what happens when you turn them off. From Four researchers looked at this properly across nine studies involving more than 7,500 people. The first stage was questionnaires, the weak part of any research like this. The second stage took it into places where people are bored for hours.
People trolling strangers online, military settings, parents describing their own behaviour. Then they did something that makes this research really interesting. They artificially created a situation that made people bored deliberately in a lab by giving them really boring tasks to do. They then presented them with an opportunity to be unpleasant to somebody.
Boredom raised the incidence of cruelty in every experiment they ran. Then they went and looked for the same thing somewhere else entirely. Two studies in school, 1,038 students between 10 and 18, rated by the classmates as well as by themselves. Students who were more often bored at school were more often cruel to their classmates, and the authors noted that the behaviour even occurred at the low end of the scale.
That's not two studies agreeing with each other. That's a cause. That's Here's the part that's rarely quoted, and it's the reason this is a leadership problem rather than the person's problem. In one of those experiments, the researchers gave bored participants several other things they could do instead.
When they had other things to do, boredom produced cruelty only in people at the high end of the trait scale, which is what you'd expect. In the experiments where there was nothing else to do, boredom produced cruelty across all participants regardless of trait strength, including, in the author's own words, among people low in the trait, people at the bottom of the scale, people like the rest of your team.
That's a finding about the entire room, not about a person. They also looked at what was driving it. The likely cause was related to wanting excitement and novelty rather than wanting to hurt anybody. That matters for what organisational leaders can do, because somebody looking for stimulation and somebody discharging anger want completely different things, and only one of those two can be handed something interesting to do.
The group of people who tend to behave this way is not a fixed list in your organisation. It fluctuates with workload and cognitive stimulation. This means that on a slow Wednesday, your team will contain more of them than it does when everyone is busy and stimulated. Crucially, it was found that cruelty is triggered by boredom, which in turn is related to workload.
That's the situation that activates cruel behaviour. This is the situation that you don't care for now. That's why The obvious theory is that the cruelty is doing the job, but something is missing and this covers it. Four researchers tested the timing of the behaviour on 120 employees, assessed twice a day for 10 days and resulting in more than 1,100 separate reports.
They found that a bored day was followed by a worse behaved day. Maybe that's predictable. However, a worse behaved day was then followed by a more bored day, so whatever relief cruel behaviour provides is gone by the next morning. What turns up instead is more of the situational state that caused it.
One caution about that study, because it measured the entire family of counterproductive behaviours, including withdrawal and rule banding, as well as unpleasantness towards colleagues. Cruelty was just one variable in a group, not the entire subject of the study. The experiments connect these two together.
That's good news, because you can break a loop anywhere on its circumference, you don't have to find where it started, and you don't have to try and change anybody. Let's Now for the second dial. In the study that put this trait on the map, participants were able to blast an innocent person with unpleasant noise.
When causing hurt to a stranger was free of any consequence and cost, several dark traits predicted who would cause harm. But when they had to work to earn the chance to cause harm by completing a tedious task first, only one trait came through. The prize separated the many from the few, guiding us where to look for the problem and its solution.
The setting where harm costs least is where this trait's negative side is amplified. That setting is online. Trolling takes seconds, carries no consequence and can reach a large audience. Across 24 studies and 14,000 people, it was found that trolling is the cheapest harm a human being can do. And of the four dark tetrad traits, everyday sadism is the strongest predictor of trolling.
In one workplace dataset of 613 Spanish employees, sadism was the only one of the four dark tetrad traits still predicting counterproductive behaviour once ordinary personality measures were accounted for. However, the research has limitations as things stand today. A review this year of dark personality and workplace bullying pulled figures for the three traits and could not produce one for everyday sadism, mainly because there aren't enough data in the workplace study pool.
The Here are some things you can actually do, and we're going to be upfront about how well evidenced each piece is as we progress. The first is judgement from practice rather than evidence-based practice. Find the troughs. Most organisations treat a slow fortnight as a recovery phase, which means either catching up with things or hiding the lack of activity from whoever is watching.
Neither involves anyone proactively managing workload, and that interval of low stimulation is where the behavioural risks sit. Identify the trough before it arrives, not during or after. Most slack periods are already known, or visible in work schedules. The wait time inside complex processes. The front end of projects.
The work nobody ever sees the outcome of. Or the gap after a large piece of work lands, which feels like a reward. The fortnight after a busy period when a large piece of work ships is usually one of the most dangerous fortnights, and nobody tries to address it. Everybody thinks they've earned a rest, and nobody wants to be the person who says otherwise.
A caution straight out of the research. The alternative has to be genuinely better than the harm. A list of low-grade admin jobs isn't a good alternative. You need a hard or otherwise stimulating problem. The Here's a second, which I would do first because it needs no conversation or judgement about who's doing what.
Ask one question about your organisation. Where is the act of doing harm currently free? The answer is usually a short list. An open channel where unkind remarks reach an audience instantly and leave no trace anyone can act on. A rota tool that lets one person influence another person's workweek without a conversation.
A review that arrives in writing with nobody standing behind it. A way of leaving somebody off something that nobody else can see. You don't have to bureaucratise everything. Just add friction at the exact point where the act becomes free. A reassignment that carries a reason. Feedback delivered in person, not by a system.
A colleague's mistake raised privately rather than in the group channel. And no way to leave somebody out invisibly. A practical example if that list is a bit abstract. If a shift can be reassigned by a simple text notification, make sure there's a mandatory short reason field, not an automated form, one sentence, attached to the name of the person issuing it.
That's 30 seconds of friction and 30 seconds can be an effective intervention. There is a limitation to be aware of. This won't stop the person at the very top of the sadism trait scale. It's not aimed at them. It stops a slow Wednesday from recruiting six other people who would never otherwise engage in counterproductive behaviour.
Good The third suggestion is also judgment from practice and it's one that determines whether the negative behaviours you've noticed are ever actionable. Every example I opened with has the same defence built into it. Single instances don't support a complaint but a pattern of behaviour does, providing it's been recorded.
Write it down. Dates. What happened. Who it happened to. Nothing else. No adjectives and no motive. The reason to keep it focused is that the list of dates and related details provides objective data rather than a subjective account about somebody. Only the former survives challenge and that makes the difference.
Not that they take pleasure in humiliating people which is an argument about your judgement and one you'll probably lose but on the 14th, the 21st and the 6th they quoted a colleague's drafting errors in the team channel. That colleague now clears everything through you before sending. There's a second benefit people underestimate.
A list of dates either clusters in the quiet weeks or it doesn't and until you have the data in front of you you genuinely don't know which pattern fits your situation. There's And three things I wouldn't do. I wouldn't screen candidates for the trait. Personality assessment instruments do exist, and some are good research tools.
But even if they work perfectly, they only address a smaller half of the problem. As we've shown, the group of people who might behave this way expands to include people no screening tool would ever flag. I wouldn't expect a fairness programme to address a problem either. A workplace study asked how feeling fairly treated changed how Machiavellian employees behaved towards colleagues.
It found that it did not change how sadistic individuals behaved at all. Don't tell the person that they enjoy being cruel. The moment you make the claim about their inner self, they can deny and you can never prove it. Meanwhile, the conversation stops being about what they did. If Nothing in this video tells you what anybody is.
The research is built from what happens to trait levels across thousands of people and the level doesn't describe the person in your team. What it does tell you is when this sort of behaviour is most likely and what the behaviour costs the person doing it. You can address both practically. Here's an uncomfortable truth.
I'd rather share it than leave it out. When the situational alternatives run out, the number of people who will behave cruelly goes up, including people at the very bottom of the scale. That finding includes almost all of us. In the next episode we'll cover two people who look identical on the outside and only one of them responds to anything you do. erstmal If you are interested in this subject, the source article this video is based on is on my website and includes every reference and research limitation.
The web address is in the description below and on screen now. One thing you can do to help me, please like and subscribe to my channel. This helps my content find new viewers and ensures you find the other videos in this dark personality series. And in the comments, tell me one thing. When is the quiet week in your organisation?
That quiet period comes with a cost and it's one of the cheapest and easiest things you can change to make a positive difference. I'm Dr Nick Kecker. Thank you for watching. Observe and act differently and I'll see you next time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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