Reading this study reminded me of old insights from behaviourism,  from which we learned that non-consequent rewarding and punishing can have unexpected consequences. So, I wasn’t surprised that employees can struggle when supervisors swing between good and bad behaviour.

From the press release:

There’s only one thing worse than an abusive boss — and that’s a boss who thinks they can make up for their bad behavior by turning on the charm the following day. That’s the key finding from a new study from researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology, which shows that employees’ morale and job performance decline sharply when leaders lurch unpredictably between good and bad behavior.

“We already know that abusive leadership takes a serious toll on workers — but now we’re seeing that leaders who swing back and forth between abusive and ethical leadership do even more damage to employees,” says Dr. Haoying Xu, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of management in the Stevens School of Business. “It turns out that reverting to an ethical leadership style doesn’t magically erase the impact of prior bad behavior — and in some circumstances, it can actually make things worse.”

The research, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, used surveys and field experiments to examine the impact of “Jekyll-and-Hyde” leadership on more than 650 full-time employees based in the United States and Europe. Dr. Xu’s team confirmed that the workers struggled when their supervisors were abusive — but found an even stronger negative impact when supervisors alternated unpredictably between abusive and ethical leadership styles.

“If you’re constantly guessing which boss will turn up — the good cop or the bad cop — then you wind up emotionally exhausted, demoralized, and unable to work to your full potential,” Dr. Xu explains.

The new research also shows for the first time that “Jekyll-and-Hyde” leadership can take a serious toll even when employees aren’t directly impacted by a leader’s on-again, off-again misbehavior. When a supervisor’s own boss alternated between abusive and ethical leadership, the study found, it created additional uncertainty and eroded employees’ confidence in the supervisor’s capabilities.

“In today’s workplaces, employees are very attuned to their supervisors’ relationships with more senior leaders,” Dr. Xu says. “If that relationship becomes unpredictable, or is marked by repeated bouts of good and bad behavior, it can cause real problems for the whole team.”

For organizations, the research offers some important new insights — most notably the fact that leaders who seek to atone for intermittent bad behavior are often doing real harm to their employees. “Organizations tend to intervene when bosses are consistently abusive, but are more tolerant of leaders whose abusive behavior only shows through from time to time,” Dr. Xu says. “With this study, however, we’ve shown that intermittent bad behavior can actually be more toxic for organizations.”

To counter Jekyll-and-Hyde leadership, Dr. Xu says, organizations should pay attention to employees who voice concerns, and hold leaders accountable for sporadic abusive behavior. It’s also worth considering anger management coaching for leaders who show signs of volatility. “This kind of intermittent abusive leadership tends to be impulsive,” Dr. Xu says. “That means there’s scope to reduce or eliminate it by helping leaders to manage their tempers and improve their impulse control.”

In future research, Dr. Xu hopes to explore how employees respond to and learn from Jekyll-and-Hyde leadership, and how a leader’s periodic abusive behavior impacts individual behavior and team dynamics. “There are some indications that this kind of leadership could be contagious, with a leader’s volatility fostering volatility in others,” he says.

There is also some intriguing early evidence that employees might learn from and emulate a leader’s bad behavior more than they replicate their good behavior. “If that’s the case, then it would be another big reason for organizations to take Jekyll-and-Hyde leadership seriously,” Dr. Xu warns.

Abstract of the study:

Drawing on uncertainty management theory and the nascent work on justice variability, we examine employees’ direct and vicarious experiences of abusive supervision and ethical leadership. Conceptualizing the simultaneous display of abusive and ethical leadership styles as a form of justice variability, we suggest that a direct supervisor’s ethical leadership exacerbates, rather than ameliorates, the detrimental effects of his/her abusive supervision on employees’ emotional exhaustion and job performance. We further contend that a similar effect exists when employees vicariously experience leadership interactions involving their direct supervisor and higher level manager, whereby higher level managers’ ethical leadership exacerbates the negative effects of their abusive supervision toward supervisors on those supervisors’ employees’ emotional exhaustion and job performance. We draw the contrast between the direct and vicarious experiences by theorizing justice uncertainty and linking-pin effectiveness uncertainty, respectively, as two distinct theoretical mechanisms that explain the two proposed destructive effects. Using a multisource and multiphase lagged field study and two vignette-based experiments, we find general support for our model. Our research advances the theories of justice variability, vicarious leadership and (in)justice, and supervisors’ linking-pin role effectiveness. We also offer practical insights for managing “Jekyll and Hyde” leadership across organizational hierarchies.