The No Asshole Rule

Robert Sutton, a Stanford professor, wrote this book after an essay of his in the Harvard Business Review collection Breakthrough Ideas for 2004 drew more than a thousand emails and testimonies. Its theme is that workplace bullying damages morale and productivity, and its proposal is a hiring and firing rule that screens such people out. Sutton insists on the blunt word because he judges that softer ones do not carry the same weight. He offers two tests for recognising the behaviour: whether people feel oppressed or diminished after an encounter, and whether the person targets those with less power. He catalogues twelve everyday forms the conduct takes, from insults and threats to interruption, shaming and snubbing, and distinguishes the temporary case from the persistent one, using an episode of his own as an example of the former. He argues that the damage reaches bystanders as well as targets, cites research on the effects of abusive supervision, and proposes that organisations estimate a total cost of the behaviour covering management time, lost clients, legal exposure and replacement hiring. He is careful to say that the rule is not a licence to hire people who will not argue, and he names constructive confrontation as the thing to protect.

Written from the wikipedia article on The No Asshole Rule.

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