Being an asshole is a right ordinarily reserved exclusively for managers and is somewhat correlated with their insecurity/incompetence. So the corporate princi

Being an asshole is a right ordinarily reserved exclusively for managers and is somewhat correlated with their insecurity/incompetence. So the corporate principle is often not against assholery per se, it's against who's permitted by the hierarchy to do it. I've seen this a few times. There's more assholes among those who have a "manager"-type title. But by no means are all managers assholes. I think it oftens comes down to: 1) emotional immaturity, where people don't know how to execute the duties of the office (getting others to do something) without some kind of abusive coercion / intimidation; 2) also likely comes down to people reflecting the authority style they were raised with - so those who were traumatized by abusive asshole parents are probably going to have that as a model of authority and reflect that when they have authority; 3) finally, I often observed it correlated with obvious insecurity, in that it seems to be a defensive mechanism where people who fear themselves to be incompetent/unworthy will compensate by trying to shore up their position with abuse of their colleagues. Ideally, promotion should prevent/remediate such behavior, but I guess that the selfish-streak often displayed by assholes is mildly adaptive for the power dynamics involved in getting promoted. As a last point, often I think there's something else, that people tend to trust that "abusive/coercive" assholes will be able to "get shit done" (by, roughly, intimidating their team) - which there is probably some "truth" to, unless a team wholesale revolts against such behavior. Overall this last points reflects some room for improvement in human organizational dynamics in general. As a counterpoint to the prevailing "assholery" discussion in this thread, it would be really cool I think to see counterexamples in detail of managers who greatly succeeded by being stellar people and really good managers. I think ideally the "asshole manager" trope will become a true relic of history, something antiquated like the tolerated alcoholic hothead, or whatever.