Shouting Matches or worse at work: how common?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I currently work in an office environment with about 15 people on the property, most of them college-educated professional or technical staff. For the past year, I’ve had a supervisor who has managed to provoke one or more persons at the office into bitter screaming matches with him at least once per month. No physical violence yet, but two fairly good employees have quit (one just yesterday) and three or four others have said they are strongly considering getting out.

A lot of this seems to come from the fact that the guy in question has several mannerisms that seem to drive people absolutely mad: 1) he tends to speak to people in a way that suggests to them that he believes they know nothing about their jobs, even if they’ve been in their position for years; 2) he routinely and loudly browbeats people who he has an issue with in front of other workers; 3) he tends to barge into other offices like Kramer bursting into Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment and begins speaking to someone even if he can see they are on the phone or talking to someone else; 4) on the frequent occasions when a disagreement erupts he will begin talking over the other person, going on and on until the other person either walks away or explodes in rage. Unfortunately, upper management hasn’t really come to grips with how corrosive the atmosphere has become here, mainly because they don’t have to routinely deal with the supervisor on a personal basis. He does have some organizational skills, and that’s good enough, apparently. I’ll also mention that although he tends to drive me up the wall as much as anyone else, I’ve never felt like there was any point in reacting to his baiting behavior, and have mostly managed to remain civil even in disagreement.

My main question is, how common is it to have this sort of constant turmoil in a workplace? I used to work on drilling rigs, and I’ve seen plenty of anger expressed in that environment, but for the past 15 years I’ve worked in office settings or at home for this company and one other, and I can’t recall ever seeing it this bad.

2

I have never worked in such an environment. I’ve worked in one where the hostility and mutual loathing was almost palpable, but it was never expressed in the way you’ve described.

Your supervisor’s behavior is clearly disruptive and counterproductive. Is there some way to work through HR channels to bring it to the attention of his supervisors?

3

I don’t know how common it is, but it sounds horrible. Get a voice recorder and tape everything.

4

I’ve never worked in an environment like that. The only time I’ve ever witnessed it was in fast food joints, watching some employees cream at others. Oddly enough, I saw it often at Popeyes, even in different stores. Seems to be part of their training.

5

Your first sentence expresses, in almost precisely the same words, a point that I have been trying to make within company channels for several months. There may be recourse eventually through HR, but the handicap to this point is that little of his more egregious behavior has been documented. This will have to change. Going through line management seems to be a non-starter unless he gets caught sacrificing chickens or something. His two direct supervisors (up to VP level) are somewhat combative Type As who, while considerably more reasonable to deal with, tend to just see him as a desirably ‘tough’ manager.

Anyway, early response seems to indicate that this is nowhere near normal, as I suspected. I’ll wait for a few others to weigh in.

6

The yelling is bad, but that’s just disgusting.

Hope they kept it out of the food.

7

It sounds ghastly. I’ve never experienced anything like that.

I wonder whether the departing employees are making it clear in exit interviews that this particular supervisor is such a bastard?

8

Sooner or later, an employee will quit and then sue for constructive dismissal. The company is at risk by continuing to employ such a manager now that it is well aware of the problem.

9

It is not clear whether these 15 people represent most of the company, or just a small division within the company. If the former I suggest you have your resume ready, even if you don’t want to leave. It does not sound like a company that will survive. They are at a huge disadvantage over companies whose employees do not have to deal with that nonsense.

10

I work for a company that many here think is the worst of the worst.

But I’ll tell you this–that kind of behavior is not allowed or encouraged. And one phone call to the supervisor of the person doing it would be addressed very quickly.

I’m not a Wally apologist–I’ve had some horrible managers in the past. But no, hell no, and never would I put up with that stuff.

11

It’s a district office of a European-based, privately held firm with about 5000 employees worldwide.

12

He sounds absolutely atrocious and above all unprofessional. I have never worked with such a person, but I am the type of person if I were treated by this individual even once like you describe I would stand up and have a firm yet professional talk with him to make sure he sis not speak to me in that way ever again. I am a human being who does nto need to get treated like that, and if this man was doing it I would quickly and professionally bring it to his attention. If he had the ability to fire me and did so because I stood up to him, I would make it clear the dept. of labor would be hearing from me.

In psychological terms his behavior sounds like patho-adolescence. He never grew up, because had he, he would not trat others the way you describe.

13

I worked the same place as that guy. It took years but he cut his own neck off eventually one knife stroke at a time. He is also prone to do the same thing with management when things don’t go his way.

14

The Spring after I graduated, while I waited for my Criminal Records Bureau disclosure to come through so I start working in a psychiatric unit, I temped for a small organisation in the public sector. Maybe 12 or 15 employees. I was in an office, on a bank of desks with 3 other people; two women and one man - the man worked part-time. Our boss was over in the corner behind a screen.

One day due a restructuring of the company that didn’t affect me as a temp, the boss offered Woman A a promotion above Woman B. A and B were great mates, went to the gym together, ate breakfast together, socialised at weekends, but they fell out over this and it was nasty.

B refused to talk to A. They used to get me to pass messages on to one another. The boss took them in to a room to mediate, and B stormed out shouting and screaming. She threatened to leave if A took the promotion. It went out for weeks.

In the end, A never took the promotion. How mean of B to bully her out of furthering herself!

When my CRB came through and I gave my week’s notice, the boss offered me a permanent job. It would pay £17.5k to the £14.5k I was going to. I badly needed the money, but I badly needed my sanity and I said no way in hell.

I have never seen such unprofessional behaviour since that. Never. I left that place four years ago and I am extremely happy I didn’t value money over peace of mind.

15

About once a year, around here. Once it was two co-workers talking politics, a couple of times it was people who came for parentage testing and seemed to think they were on the Jerry Springer show, and once a couple of doctors(!) made a scene. I wasn’t at work that day, damn it.

16

There’s a lot of screaming at my job, but it’s between the patrons, not between the staff! (Actually, a patron almost got into a fistfight with me on Wednesday. I could have taken the son of a bitch.)

17

The single only time I ever heard anyone even raise their voice at my office, it resulted in the en-loudened person being demoted. It was rather a scandal. And she was raising her voice in a closed-door meeting among people at the same level, not at anyone she supervised. I really can’t imagine the kind of behavior you describe being permissible once, let alone routinely, especially the browbeating. I wouldn’t put up with it.

18

Such a thing only happened once in all my years of working in an office.

I work as an associate lawyer in a large law firm. I often work with two partners who are also friends. They each have an administrative assistant who sit side by side outside their offices, which are next to each other.

Assistant A worked for Lawyer X, whose practice was mainly large deals of a sort that did not require much in the way of secretarial work - keeping up the filing and the like - because it dealt mostly in Lawyer X talking on the phone with various people; in contrast, Assistant B worked for Lawyer Y, whose practice consisted of hundreds of little files - requiring endless secretarial work. Physically they were very different. Assistant A was an attractive younger woman - always cheerful and happy. Assistant B was a dour older woman, very much focused on work (at which she was very, very good). Assistant A was blonde, Scandianvian in ethnicity, and her primary duty was to answer the phone and deal with clients - she spoke perfect, lightly accented English; Assistant B was an older Chinese lady, a fairly recent immigrant, who had little client contact (her accent made this difficult) but who was a master at filing, word processing, etc.

The problem was that Assistant B begain to intensely resent Assistant A. To an extent she had a point - she worked a lot harder, was better at it, but got paid the same. But it was more about personality issues. She felt that both lawyers were more friendly with Assistant A (which was I think true) and she felt left out. She took it out in egregious rudeness towards Assistant A, who after a while begain to respond in kind - making for a poisionous atmosphere all around.

Things got bizzare. Assistant B begain to get I think a trifle paranoid that Assistant A was actively messing with her work, deliberately putting stuff in the wrong files when her back was turned (for all I know it may have been true). Assistant B begain to spread rumours that Assistant A was having an affair with Lawyer X (likewise, but not really anyone’s business). Assistant A began to spread rumours that Assistant B was crazy. This sort of escalated over weeks …

The two lawyers got together and decided that the best solution would be for Lawyer Y to move down the hall so the two Assistants would not have to sit next to each other.

Of course moving a whole office is lots of administrative work, which fell mostly on Assistant B. She did not take this as accomodation, but rather as a sort of punishment, adding resentment (at this point both lawyers were aware that HR was demanding that one or both assistants be let go - they had been repeatedly lectured about getting along, behaving professionally, etc. but at this point they hated each other like poision - the move was designed to avoid this, as both lawyers wanted to keep assistants; neither was really able to deal with the situation). The very day the move was to be complete, the two Assistants got into a knock-down, pushing, shoving, hair-pulling, screaming fight. This was the last straw and both were fired. Assistant B attempted to charge Assistant A with assault, claiming she started it by making a crude remark and running her chair backwards to pin Assistant B against the files; the cops came & questioned everyone, but as far as I know it came to nothing.

Honestly if I heard that one had stalked and killed the other, I would not have been very surprised.

19

I worked for a heating and plumbing contractor one summer in college, and that’s the only place I’ve ever encountered anything like yelling and screaming at work. One guy, I think his name was Phil, would periodically* just blow up and stomp off the job site, cursing at anyone who crossed his path, claiming he was quitting and going to go fishing. Usually on a Thursday. Monday he’d be back at work.
*I learned later. Seeing it happen in person really freaked me out until I found out it was a semi-common occurrence, which freaked me out even more but in a different way.

20

That’s incredibly unprofessional, awful behavior. No way should it be tolerated.

The only job I’ve had that came close was at a large, family-owned fabric store. The owner had just about retired and his daughter had pretty much taken over the place by the time I was there. Every so often she would take someone into her office and scream and rant at them over some minor mistake. It was incredibly horrible, the more so because her office was right behind the main counter and all the customers could hear. I got out of there as fast as I could, as did almost everyone else, so she wasn’t much good at hanging on to good employees. To this day, she is the example of unprofessionalism and bad management in my head.