7 Different Types of Jerks at Work (and How to Deal With Them)

We’ve all dealt with our share of jerks at work. It could be a colleague who sucks up to the boss, a person who manages to do nothing while taking all the credit, or a boss who wants to micromanage every aspect of your day. Whatever your work nut looks like, one thing is for sure: they can make life hell.

As it turns out, even working nerds have a type. As Tessa West , an associate professor of psychology at New York University and author of the book Jerks at Work: Toxic Colleagues and What to Do About Them , explains , work nerds tend to fall into at least one of seven categories.

There are jerks, credit thieves, bulldozers, stowaways, micromanaged bosses, sloppy bosses, and finally gaslighters. All these jerks can make your life hell, albeit in completely different ways.

The good news is that if you know what to look out for, you can spot these assholes and find ways to minimize their damage. As West points out, some of the red flags to look for are not inherent in the worker jerks themselves, but in the organization, since a bad work culture can turn almost anyone into a jerk.

“Learning to read these signs early is very important,” West said. “It’s not just in the individual, it’s also in the culture.”

Kiss-up-kick-downers

One of the earliest signs of danger for kissers and kickers is the constant need to compare themselves to others. It can be important things like comparing monthly sales, or it can be meaningless things like who gets the most freebies.

“Another thing they often show up early is that they can read a room,” West said. “They figure out very quickly who has power and who doesn’t.” When it comes to power, this includes the more obvious players like the boss, but also the more informal players like the colleague everyone turns to for advice. Kiss-and-kick advocates identify these people and fawn over them to protect themselves from any complaints, making sure the people in power are on their side.

To deal with those who try to kiss or end a relationship, you need to find allies – well-connected people who can offer a point of view on your problem. It also helps to try and identify others who have been kissed. If you discuss this with your boss, you should be very specific about how kissing behavior affects productivity and morale.

Credit thieves

Credit thieves are opportunistic people. Often their strategy is to find a well-functioning team that works well together. The weakness of such teams is that it is difficult to understand who is doing what, because a lot of the words “we” are used during presentations. “They can come in and take out a loan because the team doesn’t know how to distribute loans,” West said.

If this team has a boss who doesn’t need hands-off, the credit thief often finds ways to be extra visible, relying on the fact that since the boss isn’t involved in day-to-day operations, he won’t know enough to see through the tactics of the credit thief.

“Behind the scenes, they use what we sometimes call invisible labor,” West said. These are all day-to-day tasks that are important to the success of the project, but don’t always get recognized. “A credit thief will come in and take credit for this invisible labor when no one else is claiming it.”

With regard to credit thieves, it is important that teams find ways to give credit where needed, such as identifying who did what during any presentations to superiors.

Bulldozers

With bulldozers, you get what you see. These are people who get their way no matter what, flattening everyone else in the process. There are usually two types of bulldozers: the ones you always turn off during a Zoom call, and the ones that bulldozers take down behind the scenes.

The first type of bulldozer usually doesn’t read the room well. They won’t stop talking until everyone else submits to what they want. As West points out, this type of behavior is often allowed to continue because the bulldozer has something that everyone needs, like being able to work with certain software that no one else knows.

The second type of bulldozer is a little thinner. “They tend to be very experienced and well connected,” West said. “Their talent is to hide group results they don’t like by questioning the process.” To do this, they go to the people in power and make them question the decision that is about to be made.

To deal with a bulldozer, it’s important to think of strategies to make sure your voice is heard and avoid any situations where you have to rely on a bulldozer to get things done.

Stowaways

According to West, this is the most common type of jerk at work, especially when it comes to any kind of team work. “Their main skill is that they are charming,” West said. “They are often attractive, they are funny and we like to have them around. They don’t act like jerks, they just act like very nice people who are overwhelmed and just don’t live their lives.”

Stowaways are very good at finding strong, hard-working teams, and then find a way to hide from the radar by distributing their work across the entire team so that no one feels hurt because of their idleness.

Groups that are particularly vulnerable to the free rider tend to be conscientious, cohesive, and in the habit of giving collective rewards. Free riders know that these teams will get the job done no matter what, which means others will pick up their slack while they also try to keep the peace.

“They have great presentation skills,” West said. “They’ll offer to do a presentation that the team spent 30 hours on, which creates this association in the boss’s mind between them and all the hard work, when they didn’t really do any prep work behind the scenes.”

In the case of stowaways, it is important to find a way to conduct regular integrity checks, including reports on who is doing what. As West points out, sometimes free riders do what they do simply because they have no interest in the job, not because they have no interest in the job. In these cases, free riders can be persuaded to return to their jobs by identifying tasks they may enjoy or be good at.

micromanagers

Everyone has dealt with a micromanager at least once. These are the bosses who make your life hell, interfering with every aspect of your work, no matter how minor, destroying everything in the process. With micromanagers, although their goal is to help, their efforts often backfire by slowing down your process and resulting in lower quality work.

“They work the most and do the least,” West said. “To a large extent, their micromanagement stems from chronic anxiety that they have yet to figure out how to effectively manage.” As West points out, many micromanager bosses are either because they have micromanagement bosses themselves or have never been trained to be an effective manager. “They got promoted because they were good at their old jobs, not because they can manage.” A work culture can also contribute to this problem, such as a culture of unforgiveness.

Working with a micro-manager boss means finding ways to calm that anxiety as well as set boundaries. This may include the specific definition of boundaries necessary for efficient operation, as well as scheduling regular checks at certain times.

Careless bosses

Negligent bosses are usually characterized by inconsistency. They may go weeks or months without knowing what you’ve been up to, only to suddenly swoop in, wanting to know everything you’ve been up to. “A warning sign that you have a careless boss is this chronic feeling of insecurity that you have when you never know when they will show up and wreak havoc,” West said. “They’re really inconsistent in their behavior and that’s hard to predict.”

Careless bosses can happen at any stage of your career. They can be sloppy because they don’t have managerial experience, because they have too much to do and are overwhelmed, or because they don’t have clear messages from their bosses about what they need to prioritize.

To deal with a negligent boss, West recommends asking small, specific questions; offer to take the work off their plate; or seek help from a specialist who is not your boss.

Gaslighters

For the other six types of jerks, West recommends trying to figure out what their motives are. When it comes to gaslighters, she doesn’t recommend this strategy. “Gaslighters are the scariest, most pathological jerks you have to deal with at work,” West said. “They are lying to create an alternate reality and the reason they are doing this is because they are trying to hide something.”

Gaslighters may try to cover up illegal or unethical behavior or hide signs of their own incompetence. Either way, they do this by isolating people, either by making them feel like they’re part of something special, or by slowly destroying their self-esteem. Gaslighters are very good at covering their tracks, which means they often do it in private without leaving paper trails of their behavior.

To deal with a gaslighter, West recommends building a network of people you can rely on. When you feel ready to talk about what’s going on, start small by asking people about their overall experiences with the gaslighter.