Brutal Bosses: And Their Prey

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

As American corporations accelerate their downsizing and proclaim their dedication to "leaner" staffing, the pressure on bosses increases: they are ordered to do more with less. Therein lies the issue confronted by Hornstein (Social Intervention), a psychology professor at Columbia University and a psychotherapist, after eight years of work and interviews with more than 1000 workers. He opens by listing the eight deadly sins bosses can commit: deceit, constraint, coercion, selfishness, inequity, cruelty, disregard and deification. Then he classifies brutal bosses as executioners, dehumanizers, blamers, rationalizers, conquerors, performers and manipulators, some because they are neither sensitive nor introspective, others because they are bullies; many of them, he reports, are backed by their superiors or peers. Of three conceivable remedies-changing the victims, changing the abusers and changing the system-he views only the last as feasible and then presents six survival skills to help the abused. (Mar.)

Library Journal

A psychotherapist, professor of social-organizational psychology, and senior management consultant, Hornstein writes not as an impartial observer of human behavior but as someone who has obviously had his fill of tales of employer abuse. Much of his book is a passionate, and painfully repetitive, indictment of a corporate culture that turns a blind eye to and/or explicitly condones the abuse of employees by "brutal bosses." Although this is a timely and important topic, the book's impact is diminished by the redundant narratives of anonymous employees recounting their personal on-the-job horror stories. Such anecdotal reports, paired with descriptions of the atrocious managerial behavior of real-life CEOs, grow tiresome after five chapters. The book's relative strength lies in its final two chapters, which describe solutions to employee abuse, but this is not the heart of the book. Managers, employees, and management consultants may find the subject matter interesting, but they'll likely forgo this work in favor of more substantive solutions and recommendations.-Alan Farber, Northern Illinois Univ., DeKalb

Kirkus Reviews

An awesomely aggrieved tract on the perceived problem of gratuitously swinish superiors, which reveals far more about its author (A Knight in Shining Armor, 1991, etc.) than about the amorphous wrongs he purports to address.

Offering only anecdotal evidence drawn largely from the work of other scholars and the business press, Hornstein (Psychology/Teachers College, Columbia Univ.) reaches the seemingly obvious conclusion that bosses who mistreat subordinates are a menace both to their victims and to a socioeconomic order whose vigor depends on productivity. In a format featuring checklists like the "Eight Daily Sins" (including coercion, cruelty, deceit), he attempts to put errant executives in a variety of pigeonholes, e.g., blamers, dehumanizers, manipulators, and rationalizers. With but passing acknowledgment of the fact that the workplace has become a more demanding venue as corporate America faces up to global competition, the author examines the many ways in which employees may be oppressed (or imagine themselves to be). Cases in point range from public scoldings through do-better lectures dispatched via E-mail, intimidation, electronic surveillance, and sexual harassment. Reviewed as well are the possible consequences of abuse: on-the-job violence, sub-par performance, and error-inducing anxiety. Toward the close of his whiny screed, Hornstein discloses that at age 14 he worked as a delivery boy for a shopkeeper who persisted in referring to him as "dreck" (Yiddish for trash). Earlier, the author recalled that his mother-in-law had been persecuted, probably on religious grounds, by a large communications company during the 1930s. In this personally pained context, he closes by offering innocuous tips for dealing with insufferable superiors and encouraging community sanctions to discourage, even outlaw, barbarous behavior within organizations.

An us-against-them exercise in pop anti-authoritarian sociology that, for all its lack of analytic depth and other deficiencies, could strike responsive chords among latter-day malcontents.