When leaders want to “take the temperature” of their organizations, the humble employee survey is often the bedrock of their efforts. Alas, research from Binghamton University suggests that these surveys often fail to unmask negative behavior because employees aren’t completely honest.

“Instead of capturing actual leader behaviors, ratings might simply reflect whether a person likes their leader,” the researchers explain. “People may just generally experience more of the positive stuff and are less likely to recall specifically negative leadership behaviors, especially if they’re overall happy in their workplace.”

Unearthing bad behavior

The researchers found that when employees participate in surveys and questionnaires, they often rely heavily on their long-term memory when gauging the behavior of their leaders. This can result in broad perceptions being shared about the leader’s performance, with poor behavior often overlooked, especially if they’re not all that common.

The findings suggest that companies need to rethink how they assess the performance of their leaders, with the researchers hoping that this, in turn, will help to make smarter promotion decisions and even reduce employee turnover.

“There’s a big difference between how people perceive a leader to be doing and how effective that leader truly is in that role,” they explain. “If we are promoting the wrong people, keeping bad leaders in their positions and making important decisions based on an overly simplistic approach to leadership studies, that could be a problem.”

Taking the temperature

The researchers started by asking 200 people from various jobs like sales, accounting, web development, and engineering about their experiences at work.

They asked them about bad situations with their bosses, like if their bosses publicly embarrassed their team or got very angry. About 10 percent said they had negative feelings about their bosses.

Most people, though, said positive things about their bosses, like how they do good things for their community. The interesting part is that people seemed to focus more on the general idea of their bosses rather than specific bad things that happened.

For managers in companies, the main lesson is that looking at how individual bosses act and asking employees more specific questions in surveys can help make leadership better.

“We need to think more critically about the way we measure negative forms of leadership because people are saying bad leadership is not happening,” the authors conclude. “If I’m perceiving the leader as good, does that mean the leader is actually doing well? We should be careful about the conclusions we draw based on a person’s perception of a leader.”