Conquer Workplace Bullies with Essential Insights from ‘Jerks at Work’ by Tessa West

Toxic coworkers can turn your dream job into a nightmare. Tessa West’s “Jerks at Work” offers a lifeline to those drowning in office drama. This game-changing book equips you with practical tools to identify and neutralize workplace bullies, transforming your professional life.

Don’t let office jerks derail your career. Dive into this review to unlock the secrets of a harmonious workplace and reclaim your professional peace of mind.

Genres

Psychology, Communication Skills, Corporate Culture, Business Culture, Occupational and Organizational Popular Psychology, Workplace Culture, Popular Social Psychology and Interactions, Personal Growth, Leadership, Career Success, Communication and Social Skills

 

“Jerks at Work” delves into the world of toxic coworkers and provides strategies to deal with them effectively. West identifies seven types of workplace jerks: kiss-up/kick-downers, credit stealers, bulldozers, free riders, micromanagers, neglectful bosses, and gaslighters. She offers tailored approaches for each type, backed by scientific research and real-life examples.

The book emphasizes the importance of understanding office politics and building alliances. It guides readers on how to document problematic behavior, communicate effectively with difficult colleagues, and when to escalate issues to HR or management. West also addresses the role of organizational culture in fostering or preventing toxic behavior.

Key takeaways include:

1. Identifying your own triggers and biases
2. Developing emotional intelligence
3. Setting clear boundaries
4. Building a support network
5. Recognizing when to cut your losses and move on

West’s approach combines psychological insights with practical strategies, empowering readers to transform their work environment and advance their careers despite challenging coworkers.

Review

“Jerks at Work” stands out in the crowded field of workplace self-help books. West’s blend of academic rigor and real-world applicability makes for an engaging and useful read. The book’s strength lies in its specificity – rather than offering generic advice, it provides targeted solutions for distinct types of problematic coworkers.

West’s writing style is accessible and often humorous, making complex psychological concepts easy to grasp. The inclusion of case studies and anecdotes brings the strategies to life, helping readers see how they might apply in various scenarios.

One particularly valuable aspect is the focus on self-reflection. West encourages readers to examine their own behavior and biases, fostering personal growth alongside practical skills for dealing with others.

However, the book could benefit from more exploration of systemic issues in workplace culture. While it offers excellent individual coping strategies, it sometimes falls short in addressing the root causes of toxic work environments.

Overall, “Jerks at Work” is an invaluable resource for anyone navigating difficult workplace relationships. It equips readers with a toolkit for professional success and personal well-being in even the most challenging office environments. Whether you’re dealing with a nightmare boss or a manipulative colleague, this book offers hope and practical solutions for a more positive work life.

Introduction: Learn how to handle toxic coworkers.

Jerks at Work (2022) provides a handbook for how to deal with difficult people at work. Identifying seven types of jerks, it informs you about what kind of behaviors to look out for and how to deal with them in a pragmatic, positive way.

In a world filled with uncertainty, one thing you can always count on is this: If you work, you will most definitely meet a jerk. You can work at Google, Netflix or Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, there’s basically no jerk-free zone out there. They can come in many shapes and sizes – a boss who’s always breathing down your neck, the guy who’s constantly interrupting you at meetings, the kitchen bandit who’s always steals bites of other people’s lunches or the colleague who’s trying to outright manipulate you.

We all have met our fair share of jerks at work. But here’s the deal: you don’t actually need to put up with them. There’s more you can do than venting to your friends about them after work. In fact, the author Tessa West provides researched-based strategies for how to constructively handle toxic coworkers – from the Kiss Up/Kick Downer to the dreaded Gaslighter.

In these summaries, you’ll find out

• how to avoid getting credit stolen for the work you do;
• how to get a micromanager off your back; and
• how to tell if a boss is gaslighting you.

Kiss Up/Kick Downer

Before Tessa West became a social psychologist, she was a salesperson at a high-end department store. There, she had the misfortune of working with another salesperson named Dave. Whenever the manager was around, Dave acted like a model employee. But the moment the manager left, Dave’s true colors came out. He was viciously competitive — not only stealing his colleagues’ customers, but rearranging and hiding the items they needed in the storage room, making it harder for them to complete their sales.

Dave is a classic example of the first type of jerk you might encounter at work: a kiss up/kick downer. He “kisses up” to those above him — acting polite, offering to do favors, charming their socks off, and trying to cozy up to them outside of work. In contrast, he “kicks down” people at the same level or below him in the workplace hierarchy — trying to undermine them and make them look bad in any way he can get away with.

If this sounds like something that’s happening to you at work, the first thing you should do is make sure you’re not just being oversensitive and confirm the person is actually being a jerk. To do this, find someone who is socially well-connected and knows “what’s up” at your workplace. Ask them a question like “Have you heard anything good or bad about Dave?”

If they confirm that you are indeed dealing with a jerk, try to find other victims and collect their testimonies about his behavior. To keep things professional, just ask your colleagues neutral questions, like “have you worked much with Dave? What’s that been like?”

Meanwhile, try to put as much space between you and the kiss up/kick downer as possible. Think about when and where you encounter him and how you can minimize contact. It could be something as simple as changing seats at a meeting or avoiding the coffee machine at a certain time.

When you’re ready to present your manager with your case against the jerk, remember: thanks to all that kissing up he does, your manager probably thinks highly of him, so you need to approach the issue diplomatically. Begin by acknowledging the jerk’s strengths, and then focus on his negative behaviors and how they’re impacting you and your colleagues.

Then, all that’s left to do is wait and be patient. It may take some time and behind-the-scenes action for your manager to deal with the jerk, so don’t expect an instant solution.

The Credit Stealer

What’s the key to getting ahead at work? Your performance would seem to be an obvious answer. But it’s more complicated than that.

Imagine you do a great job on a project, but no one is aware of all the work you did. Obviously, that won’t do your career any good. But now imagine a colleague swoops in and takes credit for it. Now she might get a promotion, even if she barely did any work on the project!

Meet our next jerk at work — the credit stealer — someone who takes more credit for ideas and accomplishments than she deserves.

Now, to be fair, she might not be doing this intentionally. With group projects and teamwork in general, it’s often unclear who contributed what to the final product, and we all have a tendency to overestimate the size of our contributions. We also have a tendency to assume the work we do is more visible to others than it is in reality. You may be doing lots of behind-the-scenes work that your credit stealer isn’t even aware of, like polishing documents and checking for errors.

Also, when teams are filled with like-minded people, they sometimes come up with similar ideas independently of each other. This can lead to situations where it seems like one person stole an idea from another, even though it was really just a coincidence.

With that in mind, don’t be accusatory with your potential credit stealer. Try to have a neutral conversation where you simply share your perspective and ask them for theirs. For example, “It seemed to me like we were proposing similar ideas at the meeting, and it seemed to me like I was the one who was putting them on the table first — but how did it seem to you?”

From there, broaden the conversation and focus on the facts of the matter. For instance, if you were working on a group project together, who did what? Talk about the invisible work you both put into the project. Maybe it turns out they did more than you thought they did! And if not, the facts will speak for themselves.

You can then have a pragmatic conversation about how to distribute credit more fairly in the future. One way to nip the problem in the bud is to decide who will do what before a project begins; that way, there will be no ambiguity over who did what at the end of it.

Bulldozers

The two jerks we’ve looked at so far often have one thing in common — they’re subtle. The kiss up/kick downer kisses up and kicks down at the right times and right places with the right people. And the credit stealer doesn’t try to steal credit when it would be too obvious what she’s doing; she waits for moments when there’s enough ambiguity over who did what (assuming she’s stealing credit on purpose).

The next jerk is much less subtle. Call him the bulldozer. If someone gets in his way, he just knocks them down — interrupting them when they’re in the middle of speaking at a meeting, for example. And that’s if they’re lucky enough to even have a chance to speak in the first place; at meetings, he usually dominates the conversation by being one of the first people to speak up and then holding the floor for as long as he can.

How does he get away with it? Well, he’s usually a power player. A real mover and shaker. The bulldozer tends to make friends in high places, so he has the boss and other influential people on his side. He also tends to seize upon a skill or a role that makes him indispensable to his team, like being the only one who knows how to use a new piece of software that everybody hates. Or being the person who meets with an unpopular HR manager on everyone else’s behalf.

To counteract a bulldozer, begin by taking a page from his own playbook. At meetings, try to make your positions known within the first couple of minutes. Don’t let the bulldozer be the only one to define the starting point and parameters of the conversation.

If he interrupts you, insist on finishing what you were trying to say. If you don’t feel assertive enough to do this on your own, enlist the help of some of your colleagues. Make an agreement with them that if one of you gets interrupted, another will come to his or her defense, saying something like “Hey, let’s let so and so finish her point?”

Finally, look for ways to gain back some of the outsized power that you and your colleagues have ceded to the bulldozer. Ask him to share those special skills and roles he’s monopolized — training others to use that software they’ve been avoiding or taking turns meeting with that HR manager everyone hates.

Free Riders

He works hard when their boss is around, but slacks off the moment she’s out of sight. He was a high performer early in his career, but now he’s comfortably resting on his laurels. And he has a convenient tendency to “volunteer” for work that looks important but isn’t really that hard to do, like giving a presentation that someone else prepared.

Let’s be honest, this guy seems to be living the dream. If you’re him. But if you’re everyone else? Then he’s the next jerk at work – the free rider: someone who benefits from other people’s efforts without pulling his own weight.

The stronger a team is, the more it tends to attract free riders. And that’s because free riders take advantage of three characteristics that make a group strong in the first place.

For starters, strong groups have members who are conscientious about their work — they’re dependable, disciplined, and hard-working. Unfortunately, that means they’re also prone to picking up free riders’ slack, sometimes not even realizing they’re doing it.

Second, strong groups have cohesion — their members feel close to each other and get along well together. But that means they also let down their guard with each other and avoid keeping tabs on each other, allowing free riders to slip through the cracks.

Finally, they use collective rewards to encourage teamwork instead of competition between the group members. But that can lead some people to conclude that working hard is pointless; they might as well slack off. After all, they’ll get the same reward, no matter how much effort they contribute to the team.

To root out free riding, teams need to keep track of their members’ work. One way to do this is to divvy out tasks at the beginning of a project and then periodically check in with each other by sending out a brief survey that asks three questions:

• Which tasks have you completed?
• Did you do any extra work you didn’t plan on doing?
• Did you notice anyone else doing extra work?

By getting answers to these questions, you can detect if you have a free rider in your midst. Maybe you’ll discover that just about everyone is doing some extra work on the free rider’s behalf! You can then come up with a plan for dividing the work out more fairly.

Finally, teams can remove part of the motivation behind free riding by rewarding individual performance in addition to collective achievement. Teamwork and individual effort aren’t an either/or binary— you can promote both things at once!

Micromanagers

What’s the most common reason people quit their jobs?

If you’re like 89 percent of bosses, you might think the answer is money. But that only accounts for 12 percent of people who quit. The most common reason they leave their jobs is dissatisfaction with management — and micromanagement in particular is one of the most common complaints. A whopping 79 percent of the workforce has experienced it at some point — and 69 percent of that group have thought about quitting because of it.

Micromanagers are the most common jerk at work, so there’s a good chance you’ll encounter one at some point in your career, if you haven’t already. Other than quitting your job, how can you escape their tyranny?

Well, as with other jerks at work, don’t confront them too directly. If you march into their office with an accusation of micromanagement and a list of things you’d like them to stop doing, their response will probably be defensive.

Instead, ask to have a meeting to talk about big picture goals. How does your work fit into the bigger picture of your team? What are the big picture goals of your micromanager, and how does your work contribute to them? In other words, zoom out from the little details your working relationship has become overly fixated on.

Once you’ve established the bigger picture, talk about expectations and priorities. Your understanding of what’s important might not align with your micromanager’s understanding. In fact, that might be one of the underlying causes of her micromanagement; she sees you as failing to meet her expectations and priorities, and she’s micromanaging you to try to get you on what she perceives as being the right track.

If that’s the case, see if you can come to a compromise. For example, consider the case of Matt, a journalist the author is friends with. It turned out his micromanaging boss Karen wanted him to prioritize the articles she wanted published, whereas he wanted to prioritize chasing his own leads. Their compromise? Matt would focus on the articles Karen cared about first — and if he finished them early, he could spend the rest of his time focusing on his independent projects.

If there are any behaviors you’d like the micromanager to stop engaging in, be specific and avoid generalizations. For instance, instead of saying “you’re overbearing”, say that “at the moment you’re sending me x number of e-mails per day, and it makes it hard for me to stay on task”. Also, to help keep things positive, mention things you appreciate about your micromanager and would like her to do more of, instead of just what you’d like her to do less of!

Neglectful Bosses

You’ve met the micromanager — the jerk at work who won’t leave you alone. Now, it’s time to meet the jerk on the opposite side of the spectrum: the neglectful boss — a jerk who leaves you alone too much.

If you’re currently under the thumb of a micromanager, this might sound like a dream come true — a boss who just stays out of your way and lets you do your own thing! Freedom! But here’s the rub with neglectful bosses: they’re not always neglectful. They have a knack for being attentive at just the perfectly wrong time.

That’s because they typically follow a pattern. First, they disappear for a while — leaving you to your own devices for a whole week or two for a project, let’s say. Then, right before the deadline, they start getting anxious about feeling out of the loop. And then they suddenly become way too hands-on, way too late — inundating you with hundreds of suggestions just hours before launch. And then? They go back to neglecting you. It’s a yo-yo dynamic that can leave you anxious and exhausted.

How do you escape this trap? Well, it depends on the underlying cause of your boss’s neglect. Maybe it’s just a lack of communication between the two of you. To be fair, your boss is probably pretty busy. As a result, she might be so focused on her own needs that yours aren’t even on her radar. You’ve got to let her know you need more of her time. Write a short email requesting a 30-minute meeting sometime in the next two weeks, giving her a manageable chunk of time to fit into a long enough timeframe.

But what if your boss is simply too busy for you at the moment? In that case, there are two things you can do. First, offer to take something off her plate, freeing up some time for her that she can give back to you.

Second, help her pay attention to you in a more selective way. Provide her with a list of your priorities and make it clear that of the top ten things, number one is truly number one and the other nine can wait. This will allow her to focus on number one and relax about the rest of your list. Now that paying attention to you doesn’t feel as overwhelming, she’ll be more likely to do it!

Gaslighters

Toxic coworkers come in many shapes and sizes — but all the ones we’ve looked at so far have at least one thing in common: they’re manageable. There are things you can do to fix their behaviors and achieve better relationships with them.

But the final jerk we’re going to meet is different. He’s not just a difficult person or an inadvertently bad team player. He’s downright sociopathic. You’re not going to change him. He’s not a fixer upper. All you can do is escape him.

He’s the gaslighter — someone who psychologically manipulates you into having a false sense of reality.

He begins by isolating you. Maybe he does it in a seemingly positive way. He makes you feel like you’re part of something special, such as a secret project or a selective club. Or he might erode your sense of self-worth and make you feel indebted to him, telling you things like he’s the only one at the workplace who cares about you and you’d have been fired if it wasn’t for him. Or he does a cunning combination of both.

After having sneakily isolated you, he then starts taking advantage of you, often by turning you into an unwitting accomplice in one of his unethical schemes. Consider the story of Kunal — an employee at an advertising firm. His gaslighter was his boss Julie. She told him to keep their work together secret, because, she claimed, their workplace was filled with cutthroat competitors who would try to steal their work.

In reality, Julie herself was stealing other people’s work and then asking Kunal to edit it, unknowingly helping her cover her tracks. One day, Kunal thought he saw her logging into a coworker’s account, but when he asked her about it, she said he was just imagining it — another classic gaslighter move.

To prevent a gaslighter from warping your sense of reality, start writing down every suspicious thing you observe him saying or doing. Memories are fallible, and gaslighters try to mess with them, so you need to put things down in writing to preserve them.

While doing this, you should also begin gradually rebuilding your relationships at work, to escape your isolation. Start by connecting with people with similar status and positions as you, and then work your way up and out from there, expanding your network to eventually include a social referent. This is someone who is especially well-liked, connected, and respected at your workplace. She can be your advocate and convince the higher ups at your company to do something about your gaslighter.

You’ll probably need the assistance of someone like this, because the person who is gaslighting you is probably someone with more power than you.

Final Summary

Okay, if there’s one thing we can take away, it’s that you don’t have to just put up with toxic coworkers. There are alternatives to venting to your friends about them and hoping that all your problems will go away.

For starters, try to pinpoint their behavior. What exactly are they doing? Are they micromanaging, neglecting, bulldozing, free riding? Once you figure that out, try to address it. Again, that doesn’t mean you have to confront them directly. Sometimes, the solution could be something as simple as setting up a non-confrontational meeting to help you get on the same page — but other times, a more drastic action will be needed, and you may need the help of people higher up in your company’s hierarchy. Either way, you need to be thoughtful, strategic and open-minded about any and all possible solutions

About the author

Tessa West is an Associate Professor of Psychology at New York University, where she is a leading expert on interpersonal interaction and communication. She has published over 60 articles in the field of psychology’s most prestigious journals, and has received multiple grants, including from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. She is the recipient of the Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Societ for Personality and Social Psychology. She writes regularly about her research in the Wall Street Journal.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1 Kiss Up/Kick Downer
2 The Credit Stealer
3 The Bulldozer
4 The Free Rider
5 The Micromanager
6 The Neglectful Boss
7 The Gaslighter
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
What Type of Jerk Do I Have at Work?
Quiz 1: Am I a Jerk at Work?
Quiz 2: Am I a Effective Ally?
Notes
Index