Counter-reform at the office: Is the tyrannical boss back?

Media outlets such as The Atlantic, Fortune, The Economist and the Financial Times have issued a dire prediction for 2024. These leading publications believe that this will be the year of counter-reform in the workplace and the return of the providential man (there are some women, but they are mostly men), or corporate tyrant. According to BBC labor trends expert Alex Christian, that is already happening or will happen a bit everywhere, but especially in the hotbed of global capitalism trends that is the United States.

As Christian explains, the post-pandemic years have seen friction between bosses and employees over the crucial issue of returning to the office. Employees from all walks of life have fought tooth and nail to retain the flexibility and quality of life that they associated with teleworking. Some even obtained “better salaries, more dignified conditions and a higher degree of autonomy.”

Between 2021 and the summer of 2023, workers had a formidable resource, akin to the nuclear option of labor relations, at their disposal: the Great Resignation. As defined by Anthony Klotz, the economist who coined the expression, that term refers to masses’ fearlessness about leaving their jobs if they could not find a way to make them compatible with their personal priorities and life projects. If you don’t play by my rules, I’m out.

For Christian, it became a veritable “workers’ revolt,” but eventually it was quelled effortlessly once the pace of hiring slowed down. As early as the first half of last year, companies like Disney, Amazon and KPMG became the first to force their employees to return en masse into the office. In the words of Grace Lordan, associate professor of behavioral science at the London School of Economics, “bosses were already resorting to strategies such as incentivizing the return to the office with free menus and yoga sessions,” but those who took the step of demanding it without further ado, “replacing the carrot with the stick,” found that their employees were no longer as willing to leave as they had been a few months earlier. Unsurprisingly, the return of the office brought back the usual servitude of corporate culture.

Beatrice Nolan, a reporter for Business Insider, notes that “bosses have regained control,” after the sword of Damocles of the Great Resignation proved impotent in this new climate of increasing authoritarianism, layoffs and the steady rise of artificial intelligence. A symptom of this abrupt change in direction is that the international business press has brought back a sub-genre that we thought was finished: the success stories of unscrupulous bosses. Such is the case of Wang Chuanfu, the man who has just snatched Tesla’s crown as the world’s leading producer of electric cars. The chairman of BYD, a company based in the Chinese city of Xi’an, and a partner of Warren Buffet (among others), Wang is now in vogue in business schools for his visionary drive, “his emphasis on technology, cost-cutting and tight control of the supply chain,” and for his “firm and merciless” management style, as Edward White and Peter Campbell explain in the Financial Times.

As described, the senior Chinese executive is both a scourge and a revered figure for his employees. They suffer from his extremely high level of demands — ”Wang doesn’t believe in such nonsense as work/life balance,” labor consultant Michael Dunne says in the same report — and his tendency to replace them at the first sign of weakness, as if they were “mere robots.” But, in theory, workers are also infected by his Stakhanovite work ethic. Wang has been able to compete with Elon Musk because, as the Financial Times argues, he is cut from the same cloth — that of bosses willing to sleep on a rusty mattress in a corner of the factory if circumstances require it and, consequently, inclined to demand the same level of involvement and commitment from the people they have on their payroll. Even those who are paid the least.

The epicenter of Wang’s electric sedan empire is in an authoritarian state, the People’s Republic of China. But the leaders of the new labor counter-reform, those who advocate a wholesale return to the logic of non-negotiable effort, grueling schedules, fanatical commitment and lives consumed by careers until the last drop of energy has been squeezed out, continue to proliferate all over. Some of them engage in pathologically narcissistic behavior, as described by Pilita Clark in her article “The Inescapable Tyranny of the Bad Boss” in the Financial Times.

Clark focuses on a couple of particularly grotesque cases, such as that of Steven Yousif, an Australian businessman prosecuted for engaging in “motivational” practices that could be considered torture. He goes on to provide a striking statistic: over two-thirds of U.S. professionals say that they have experienced the tyranny of a “toxic” boss at one time or another, and just over 31% say they are currently experiencing it. In Europe, which has a less dynamic labor market but is generally less susceptible to the myth of the great guru and exceptional leader exported by Silicon Valley, the percentage is down to 13%.

Sometimes, as Clark points out, the worst bosses are the most obsessed with projecting an image of disruptive leadership. In his opinion, that is true of Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Association, one of the world’s leading investment funds. Dalio recently intrigued management experts with his culture of “radical transparency,” which consists of subjecting his employees to a series of mass meetings in which they are aggressively urged to express their ideas out loud without any filter. It is taken for granted that those who are not willing to speak out will unquestioningly accept the company’s basic instructions, which are established in a set of guidelines known as The Principles. In his book The Fund (published in November 2023), journalist Rob Copeland explains how this demand for intense, horizontal dialogue translates into a nightmarish climate, in which employees suffer anxiety attacks after being interrogated, pressured or subjected to public scorn by a “leader” who must exercise autocratic control of the company he manages and very often confuses frankness with cruelty.

Bernat Muniesa, a professor of political thought at the department of history at the University of Barcelona, used to tell his students something that has remained relevant in the past 30 years: “Speak freely, let’s pretend that we live in a democratic society. Then you will go out into the labor market, and you will see how naïve that pretense is.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition