Bullying the Boss: An Understudied Destructive Dynamic

Offices are filling up after summer leave, perhaps with mandates to come to the office more frequently, certainly with the press of AI, and with the end of the fiscal year looming. Those stressors and changes can strain workplace relationships. Managers are caught between a rock and a hard place: teams concerned for their jobs and superiors who want to see ever-increasing ROI.

When we think about workplace bullying, the narrative is almost always the same: a person with more power targeting a person with less, a senior manager undermining a junior employee, a boss using their authority to isolate, diminish, or push out someone beneath them. That story can be accurate, but it is incomplete.

There is a second dynamic in workplaces that receives almost no attention, generates almost no research, and is almost never named by the people experiencing it: upward bullying. The systematic targeting of a manager by the people they manage.

In this article we uncover what upward bullying looks like compared to healthy debate and professional challenge, what the research says about what fuels it, and why managers who experience it are often the last to speak up or be believed.

Upward bullying is one of the most under-researched phenomena in workplace psychology. The reason is structural: the dominant model of workplace power assumes that bullying flows downward, from those with more authority to those with less. The idea that a subordinate could systematically bully their manager challenges that model in ways the field has been slow to accommodate.

10% of managers report experiencing bullying from subordinates (Björklund et al., 2019).

11.4% of workers admit to behaving aggressively toward their supervisor (Lyubykh et al., 2022).

50%+ of managers in India experienced repetitive negative actions from subordinates, co-workers, or superiors (Rai and Agarwal, 2017).

And yet: 70.6% of subordinates reported having engaged in bullying behavior toward their supervisor in a six-month period (ResearchGate 2024).

The discrepancy between what managers report and what subordinates confess is striking.

Upward bullying may in fact be worse than other forms of bullying. It is complicated by the belief of senior leadership, peers, and colleagues that 'you should be able to manage it.' That expectation produces shame, and shame produces silence. Further, a subordinate who bullies is likely to become a boss who bullies.

The research identifies three categories of upward bullying behavior. These categories are intended to help distinguish the fine line between legitimate workplace debate and systematic targeting.

Category 1: Behavioral Undermining. Refusing to carry out reasonable instructions. Deliberate non-cooperation with tasks or projects. Consistent lateness or absence without adequate explanation. Making the manager look incompetent in front of others. Forming coalitions with other team members against the manager.

Category 2: Verbal and Relational Aggression. Tone that communicates contempt rather than disagreement. Word choices designed to diminish rather than challenge. Petulance when challenged, emotional escalation in place of reasoned response. Dismissiveness of the manager's expertise or authority. Public challenges designed to humiliate rather than clarify. Gossip and negative narrative-building about the manager with colleagues.

Category 3: Systemic Targeting. Coordinated behavior with other team members. Formal complaints designed to exhaust or destabilize. Using HR processes as weapons rather than as process-oriented escalation routes. Information withholding that undermines the manager's ability to do their job. Recruiting others, including senior stakeholders, into a negative narrative.

The difference between challenging a manager's thinking and bullying them is not the subject matter. It is the intent, the tone, the pattern, and the presence or absence of true openness to the response.

Healthy challenge is a sign of a psychologically safe team. People who disagree, ask hard questions, push back on decisions, and advocate for different approaches are doing exactly what high-performing teams need.

To be clear, a manager who cannot tolerate any challenge is a different problem. Upward bullying is different in several specific and identifiable ways:

1. Intent. Healthy challenge seeks a better outcome. Upward bullying seeks to destabilize, diminish, or remove the manager. The goal is not the quality of the decision, it is the undermining of the person making it.

2. Pattern. A single heated disagreement is not bullying. Systematic, repeated, sustained targeting is. The research consistently notes that bullying is defined by pattern, not incident.

3. Receptivity. Someone who challenges in good faith is open to the response. The upward bully escalates when challenged back. There is petulance where there should be reason. Emotional flooding where there should be adult engagement.

4. Word choice and tone. The specific words used in a challenge carry information about intent. 'I see it differently, can you help me understand your reasoning?' is challenge. 'That's a ridiculous way to approach this' is contempt. Contempt is not feedback. It is aggression.

5. Maturity. Healthy professional disagreement requires the capacity to hold one's own position while remaining truly open to another. The upward bully cannot do this. They require to win, not to resolve. This is a developmental capacity that is sometimes absent.

The obvious question remains: why would someone bully the person who manages them? Research identifies several enabling and motivating factors.

Enabling factors. Low psychological safety climate: environments where aggression is generally tolerated. Unclear managerial boundaries: when the manager's authority is ambiguous, it becomes contestable. Manager vulnerability: new managers, managers in transition, and managers in high-dependency roles are particularly targeted. Organizational change: periods of instability create conditions where power is in flux and challenging authority feels lower risk. Weak interpersonal skills in the subordinate: the research identifies this as a primary factor.

Motivating factors. Perceived benefit: the research shows upward bullying is sustained when it produces results: reduced expectations, more autonomy, removal of oversight. General disgruntlement with the work situation displacing onto the manager. Competitive threat: the manager's success reflects poorly on the subordinate's own trajectory. A reversal of perceived power: the subordinate holds expertise, relationships, or institutional knowledge the manager depends on.

Some upward bullying behavior has the quality of adolescent social dynamics rather than adult professional engagement: the petulance, inability to tolerate authority, emotional flooding when challenged, requirement to win rather than resolve, coalition-building and the use of social exclusion as a weapon.

This does not mean the perpetrator is immature in every domain. It may mean there is a specific gap in the capacity to navigate authority relationships, to hold disagreement without aggression, to remain a functional adult when they do not get what they want.

Whether that gap reflects arrested development in a specific domain, a learned pattern from a particular environment, or something else entirely is not something this article can diagnose. What the research does show is that the behavior is recognizable, it is patterned, and it does not respond to the same interventions as ordinary conflict.

The upward bully is not simply having a bad day or challenging the thinking. They are running a campaign; campaigns require a different response than legitimate disagreements.

If you are a manager experiencing systematic targeting from someone on your team, the research offers several important reframings:

1. Name it. Upward bullying is real, it is researched, and it affects managers' wellbeing and performance in the same way as other forms of bullying. You are not imagining it and you are not failing at management.

2. Document the pattern. A single incident is a conflict. A pattern is a problem. Document dates, specific behaviors, and witnesses. The pattern is your evidence.

3. Do not manage it alone. Managers who experience upward bullying often feel they should be able to handle it; the 'you should be able to manage it' expectation produces shame and isolation. Go to HR earlier than feels necessary. Get your manager involved.

4. Know the difference. If the person is sincerely challenging your thinking with openness, with reason, with maturity, that is valuable. Create more of it. If the behavior is contemptuous, patterned, and does not respond to direct engagement, that is targeting. Treat it as such.

5. Your vulnerability matters. New managers, managers in transition, and managers who are highly dependent on their teams are the most targeted. Understanding why the dynamic is happening helps you address the conditions that enable it.

There is no better time to start setting new boundaries and shifting the dynamic than today. We have developed research-backed resources specifically for managers navigating these dynamics, including the Manager's Supportive Habits Guide, which provides scripts for the most difficult conversations, documentation strategies, and frameworks to identify whether what is happening is a conflict or a campaign.

The Compass, our no-cost diagnostic, will lead you through a quick set of questions and provide you with an analysis and relevant resources to consider.

The Vault is an encrypted personal space to host the exact scripts you need to handle that team meeting or 1:1, provides email templates to make sure you're covered after every meeting, and templates to create the exact paper trail you need to keep the facts straight.