Have you ever had a really bad boss? Think Alec Baldwin as Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross, who announces that “coffee’s for closers only” and then threatens the salesmen he supervises with a number of choice terms not suitable to repeat here. Few leaders use quite so much verbal abuse, profanity, and fear to motivate employees. But plenty of leaders use similar, if less extreme, tactics. Deborah Gruenfeld would like to know why so many people put up with them.

Gruenfeld, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business and an expert on the psychology of power, is interested in “dominant actors” like Blake: leaders who assert power by being the most competitive, most aggressive, and most controlling person in the room.

“There is this tendency for people to allow others to assert dominance without resisting,” she says. “People who behave this way tend to be very successful even though people really don’t like or respect them very much.”

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