Defending Jerks at Work

By Lisa Takeuchi Cullen

There's a niceness campaign overtaking corporate America. It's called the No Asshole Rule, a mantra set forth in a current business best seller of the same title. It is already practiced by the most esteemed employers of the day--Google, Southwest Airlines--and is finding followers even where being a jerk was part of the job description. If the campaign is won, soon all but the pleasantest of us will be banished from the workplace. And I, for one, will be sorry.

Robert Sutton, an organizational psychologist who teaches at Stanford, introduced the rule in 2005 in the Harvard Business Review. He's hardly the first to reveal the disruptive damage wrought by workplace bullies, as shown by the depth of scholarly literature he cites. But something about Sutton's message hits a nerve. Maybe it's the epithet, which he defines helpfully as someone who persistently belittles and abuses those of inferior power or status. (As if we needed it spelled out.) Or maybe it's his argument that jerks exact a cost to the bottom line as they single-handedly corrode an organization's cohesion. An IT company he mentions went so far as to calculate a star salesman's TCA--total cost of asshole--by totting up expenses attributed to his behavior. Turnover, legal bills and anger-management courses rang up a TCA of $160,000. So the company jerked some of the jerk's bonus.

Even before the rule, being an asshole could get you fired. It happened to Terrell Owens. And to Bobby Knight. Donald Rumsfeld got us mired in Iraq, but all the talk after his booting was about his sneering intransigence. Rupert Murdoch canned Judith Regan after her much booed O.J. Simpson memoir, but the publishing exec's rude behavior apparently sealed the deal. Sutton tells of law firms and Wall Street shops now purging their louts. As more corporations adopt codes of conduct that outlaw boorishness, we may see managers stapling the broken contract to the pink slip.

That's a shame. Sure, beastly bosses have shaved months off my life. But they have also been some of the most gifted people I've known. This correlation occurs with reason: talented people can get away with much worse behavior. I don't want to enable monsters. In fact, I don't want to interact with them. But neither do I want to work in an office staffed solely with smiley faces. Imagine American Idol without Simon, House without House, Family Guy without Stewie. Colleagues of Steve Jobs bear the scars, but wouldn't you prefer him on your team than theirs?

Sutton cops to as much in a penultimate chapter titled "The Virtues of Assholes." His solution is to keep a token terror--one brilliant bully per office. Sounds reasonable. But beware, he warns: One jerk's nastiness can pollute the water cooler. Maybe that's not such a bad thing. We can all use a shot of malevolence now and then.