I’ve written before about the viral nature of abusive behavior in the workplace.  For instance, one study found that a precarious or threatening situation at work can often result in managers lashing out on those beneath them.

A second study then highlighted how this toxic environment can rapidly spread throughout an organization.  The research highlights how abusive behavior towards an employee not only affects that specific employee, but it also encourages other members of the team to begin acting abusively towards one another.

The results of a recent study by researchers at Vanderbilt University should perhaps come as no surprise therefore.  It found that when senior managers are abusive to middle managers, they in turn are likely to be abusive to those within their own teams, which generally results in those people leaving.

“Middle managers’ treatment of employees reflects how bosses treat them,” the authors say.

The authors believe that middle managers tend to model their behavior on those above them in the organization, and so a bad role model tends to result in bad behavior from themselves.

“If an organization wishes to address issues related to line employees’ work attitudes, it should address behavior and work attitudes from the top down.” the paper says. “The focus should not just be on employees and their managers, but also on the signals being sent by senior managers every day as they interact with their middle-level manager subordinates.”

Interestingly, the impact of this trickle down of abuse was strongest on female middle managers.

“While the trickle-down effect is general, there may be subgroups especially influenced by the trickle-down dynamic and we have identified women middle managers as a group that is especially affected by the trickle-down effect,” the authors reveal.

All of which is far from ideal, and far from conducive to the kind of collaborative and innovative cultures that many of our organizations are trying to foster.

It should be said that the study was exploring the hospitality industry in isolation, so it can’t be certain that their findings could be replicated in other sectors, but the authors are understandably confident that they will be and hope to prove as much in a future study.

If you want to create the right culture however, it does appear that it has to start at the very top.