“We asked employees to recall a time when their supervisors abused them in the workplace,” says Lindie Liang of the School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The point: to study what made people feel better after being treated unfairly by their boss.
To relieve their stress, the researchers had a study group of 229 people in Canada and the United States abuse voodoo dolls representing their bosses with pins, candles, or pliers, and then fill out a questionnaire to see if they felt better compared to a control group that didn’t abuse the dolls.
The results were published in The Leadership Quarterly, and “What we found, across several studies,” Liang says, is “people who had the opportunity to retaliate, to harm the voodoo doll that symbolized their boss, they actually showed restored justice perception.” In other words, he says, they felt they got revenge “without actually murdering their supervisor.”
*
[The original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #17268]