Article of BusinessWeek, June 20, 201
The latest crop of business school research focuses on CEO pay, knowledge-sharing, and the surprising benefits of employee revenge-taking
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While there is a lot of research into what motivates people to work harder, there is little information about what drives people to sabotage their bosses. That's the mystery that David I. Levine, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business (Haas Full-Time MBA Profile), and co-author Gary Charness, an economics professor at UC, Santa Barbara, wanted to solve. To tap into the wisdom of Bay Area office workers, the team canvassed train commuters during rush hour about work behavior. They found that when employees retaliate against managers, it's not necessarily a bad thing, says Levine.
The kind of revenge taken is what matters to people. For example, if a misbehaving boss needs a file to complete a job and an employee knows where it is, people prefer that the employee simply refrain from divulging its whereabouts, rather than actually hide it from the boss. While passive resistance is deemed acceptable, active revenge bothers people, says Levine...
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