Taking the Jerk Out of Work

"Whatever you do, stay away from the a**holes," advised Robert Sutton's father when he was younger.

Unfortunately for Sutton and most of us, workplaces can't give a jerk-free guarantee. Just like the family black sheep, there's one (or 10) in every company brandishing email sarcasm, rolling their eyes at business meetings or sauntering by you in the hall without bothering to say hello.

Sutton, a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University who has consulted for numerous Fortune 500 companies, says the most common and damaging type of office jerk is the egoist to whom everyone else doesn't exist.

While this type of nasty behavior can often slip by unnoticed, it can erode morale and drive good employees out. One client, a legal secretary, told Sutton she couldn't stand this treatment from one of her co-workers, and felt slighted by "the partner who never ever looks at me, speaks to me or acknowledges that I exist."

Sutton's book The No A**hole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't is chock-full of such examples, demonstrating that bad behavior is never in short supply. More importantly, it describes how those jerks we all want to tell off can cost a company dearly.

One employer of a highly compensated salesman in Silicon Valley decided to quantify the costs of his star employee's rotten behavior. The employer estimated that his cost for one year was $160,000, which included anger-management training, overtime costs associated with his last-minute demands and time spent by HR professionals to mitigate his disasters.

"In an organization of 1,000 people, the total annual cost of [office jerks] is estimated at $750,000," says Sutton.

The situation becomes worse in professions where lives are at stake. Operating in constant fear had a detrimental effect on trainees at an Ob/Gyn clinic with high mortality rates.