Moderate Exercise Minimizes Supervisors' Abusive Behaviors Towards Their Subordinates

A displacement activity for aggression.

If your boss is giving you a hard time - lying, making fun of you in public and generally putting you down, he or she may benefit from some exercise, according to a new study by James Burton from Northern Illinois University in the US and his team.

Their work shows that stressed supervisors, struggling with time pressures, vent their frustrations on their employees less when they get regular, moderate exercise. The research is published online in Springer's Journal of Business and Psychology.

In the current economic climate, it is not unusual to come across stressed supervisors. But does that mean that they have to transfer their frustrations onto the people they supervise? Research shows that when a supervisor experiences workplace stress, his or her subordinates feel they bear the brunt of that frustration. Burton and his team's study is the first to examine how exercise can buffer the relationship between supervisor stress and employee perceptions of abusive supervision or hostile behavior towards them.

But, if you suggest this to your boss...

A workplace Catch-22.