What to Do When Your Boss Is an Egotist

Following the public downfall of President Joe Biden’s lead scientific adviser, Dr. Eric Lander, STAT reporter Matthew Herper came out with the bold statement that this was “not just a blow to one president’s plans for advancing research, but a signpost on the death march of a certain way of doing science. It’s not quite ‘big science… Call it ‘big ego.’ Big science is here to say, Herper concludes, but the “outsize personality” is on its way out.

This analysis of possible changes in the workplace dynamics within scientific labs raises larger questions about where “big egos” are headed in workplaces more generally. You can undoubtedly relate to the experience of people whose daily lives are spent in the constant feeding and nurturing of a boss’s grandiose needs. Perhaps you’ve had, or have, a boss who wants to take credit for every accomplishment of the people in their unit. Seething with resentment, you nevertheless are forced to cater to their every whim. You secretly hope they’ll be exposed for what they are, making it possible that a non-egotistical leader will magically come along and take their place.

Herter ascribes Lander’s problem as “hamartia, the classic Greek tragic flaw.” Speaking to his staff in disrespectful if not bullying ways in his White House post, he brought with him the “bad old habits” from his previous positions, which began to “metastasize.” Or, Herter suggests, “Perhaps he could always be a jerk.”

Big Egos in the Workplace

Research in organizational psychology can provide key insights into what happens when bosses become victims of their own tragic flaws of outsize egos. According to Peres Academic Center’s Lily Chernyak-Hai and Netanya’s Academic College Aharon Tziner (2021), companies may indeed be moving toward a structure that values positive workplace behaviors, including those of bosses. However, for the time being, there are plenty of these supervisors occupying positions of leadership.

According to the authors, there is a new wave of organizational research dedicated to understanding what are called “Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCBs).” Not traditionally rewarded, they are considered voluntary in the sense that employees can choose to follow them or not. The specific behaviors that constitute these OCBs include respecting other people’s rights, staying away from conflict, assisting other employees, and not complaining about trivial issues. These behaviors, furthermore, promote the “efficient and effective functioning of the organization.” To be considered an OCB, however, the acts must qualify as altruistic in that they don’t result in direct gain, financial or otherwise.

Now think about what happens when the supervisor not only fails to enact the OCBs but directly violates them. Does that egotistical boss belittle their employees, bully them in front of others, and let out a litany of complaints against everyone and everything? According to Chernyak-Hai and Tziner, the “leader-member exchange” (LMX) model suggests that this behavior erodes the sense of trust that employees have in their organization, stimulating them in turn to engage in fewer OCBs.

Understanding Why Egotistical Bosses Behave the Way They Do

It may not be only the behaviors themselves that create problems when bosses are bad, but their underlying motivations. Don’t you ever wonder why your own egotistical boss isn’t nicer to everyone? According to the framework within psychology known as attribution theory, you’ve probably engaged in more than a little of this armchair psychoanalyzing. The two possibilities you can arrive at, within attribution theory, are that there are internal and external explanations for this behavior. It might be that the boss has deep-seated psychological problems or motivations (internal) or that the boss faces pressure from their bosses to produce more results at all costs (external).

The organizational ethical climate (OEC) may indeed be more important than you realize. The Israeli researchers, in their review of previous work, note that OEC comprises three aspects of which one is egoism, defined as “maximizing self-interest, profit, and efficiency.” The other two components of the OEC are benevolence (e.g. concern for the welfare of others) and principle (e.g. adherence to moral standards). See if you can outline the OEC in your own place of employment. How does this affect the way you interpret your boss’s behavior?

In the hypothetical model that Chernyak-Hai and Tziner tested, employee attributions form the starting point predicting OCBs through a complex route involving experience of negative workplace emotions and need for self-enhancement (self-protection) with their perceptions of the OEC playing an intervening role. Across a sequence of two studies on employed adults, the authors obtained self-report data measuring these components of their overall model. Both investigations showed that employees who attributed negative qualities to their supervisors felt worse about their jobs and the workplace and, in turn, were less likely to engage in OCBs. However, if employees believed that the workplace rewarded egoism, this mitigated the effect of the manager’s negative behavior who they now could see as acting at the behest of the larger corporate culture.

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Is There a Way Forward with an Egotistical Boss?

Understanding why your boss is egotistical, based on the findings, might serve as a way to neutralize your own anger and resentment for their bad decisions and poor treatment of their employees. However, is this understanding going to be enough to keep you going when you’re at the receiving end of this unfair treatment? And why should you have to adapt your own internal view of right and wrong because that’s the prevailing culture of your company?

It's in this aspect of their study that the Israel authors believe there is an object lesson. First, they suggest the findings support the need for greater openness between leaders and their employees in why decisions are made the way they are. Perhaps a friend of yours was let go for what you believe is an unfair reason. If there was a way to hear your supervisor’s side of the story, you might feel somewhat more sympathetic even if you didn't like the decision. By the same token, that egotistical boss may be looking at you in ways that create potential misunderstandings and conflict. The “flip side of the coin,” Chernyak-Hia and Tziner note, is that attributions work both ways.

Optimistically, you might even go so far as to hope that the organizational ethos will one day evolve in your own workplace and society in general so that some of the bad behaviors that bad bosses engage in are no longer considered acceptable. As Herter noted in his commentary, ego won’t go away in science, but “the consequences of behaving badly at work have become so large” that if leaders want to accomplish their goals, they’re going to have to stop disparaging and bullying their co-workers, colleagues, and employees: “This next era’s stars will be made of stuff that is less rude.”

To sum up, knowing that things might be changing in science won’t directly impact your life right away. However, when “big egos” become less acceptable as “big bosses,” there is hope that those changes will eventually change the norms to allow workers and those in their lives to achieve greater fulfillment.