When Recognizing the Wrong Manager Means Recognizing Your Own Mistake
- Aug 3
- 8 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Written by Barbara Suigo, HR Consultant, Author & Independent Researcher in Organisational Behaviour
Barbara Suigo is an Italian-French author, HR consultant, and independent researcher specialising in power dynamics and organisational behaviour. She is the author of five books and explores topics including charisma, organisational psychology, and the abuse of power in the workplace through articles, podcasts, and books.
In organizations, something that appears difficult to explain can happen more often than we might think: a manager begins to create problems, the people around them notice, the signals become increasingly difficult to dismiss over time, and despite this, those with the power to intervene continue to support them. The most immediate explanation is that senior leaders simply do not know what is happening. Sometimes that is certainly the case, but not always, because there are situations in which the information reaches them, is heard, and yet fails to produce the change one would expect.
This is the aspect I want to explore here. I have already written extensively about the behavior of toxic managers and the consequences they can produce. This time, I would like to shift the focus to the other side and try to understand what happens in the minds of those who protect them.
Because recognizing that you are dealing with a bad manager can mean something far more difficult, especially for the person who chose them: recognizing that you were wrong.
When a first impression becomes a conviction
One possible starting point is the halo effect, described by psychologist Edward L. Thorndike as early as 1920. The principle is well known: a positive judgment about one characteristic tends to influence the overall judgment we form about a person, and it is something that can happen to any of us.
In a company, this can carry considerable weight. A senior manager who is initially perceived as brilliant, reliable, or particularly effective does not simply receive a positive evaluation. A reputation gradually begins to form around them.
Reputations have an interesting quality: once they have been established, they are not necessarily reconsidered every time new information appears.
The issue, then, does not concern only the initial impression, but what happens afterward, when evidence begins to emerge that no longer fits that image.
Admitting that we were wrong is harder than we think
In the 1950s, American social psychologist Leon Festinger, then a professor at Stanford University and regarded as one of the most influential social psychologists of the twentieth century, developed the theory of cognitive dissonance. According to Festinger, when we are faced with beliefs or information that are incompatible with one another, we experience psychological tension that we tend, in one way or another, to reduce.
In 1959, Festinger and fellow social psychologist James M. Carlsmith carried out an experiment that became a classic in the study of cognitive dissonance. Participants were assigned deliberately monotonous and tedious tasks. Some were then asked to convince the next participant that the experiment had actually been interesting and enjoyable. One group received 1 dollar for doing so, while another received 20 dollars, a considerable difference at the time.
The most interesting result concerned those who had received only one dollar: afterward, they rated the activity as more enjoyable than those who had received twenty. The explanation proposed by the researchers was that 20 dollars provided sufficient external justification for saying something they did not believe, whereas a single dollar did not. This created greater dissonance between "the task was boring" and "I told someone else it was interesting." One way of reducing that tension was to alter, at least partly, their own attitude towards the experience.
Now consider someone who has personally supported a manager's career for several years. They chose that person, backed them, and probably defended them through difficult moments, perhaps even presenting them as one of the strongest people in the organization. Then different information begins to emerge: some employees describe troubling incidents, while others question the way the manager leads the team.
At that point, the information no longer concerns only the manager because it inevitably begins to involve the judgment of the person who selected them.
Taking it fully seriously may require revisiting a decision in which a great deal has already been invested, perhaps on a personal level as well. This is precisely when we may begin, often without realizing it, to look for explanations that are less destabilizing. A conflict that initially appeared to reveal a management problem may be reinterpreted in light of the employee's personality, or questionable behavior may be treated as an isolated incident, not significant enough to alter the overall judgment formed over the years.
In this way, the original conviction remains largely intact, while the new information is gradually adjusted until it becomes compatible with what was already believed.
Another particularly interesting psychological mechanism comes into play here. In the 1990s, Ziva Kunda, a social psychologist and professor at the University of Waterloo, published a study that became a key reference in the field of motivated reasoning. Kunda showed that the way we reason is not always independent of the conclusion we would prefer to reach. When we have an interest in believing that a certain conclusion is true, we may become more receptive to the arguments that support it and more demanding towards the information that challenges it. This does not necessarily mean consciously distorting reality. We may continue to see ourselves as entirely rational because the conclusion we reach still has to appear justifiable to us.
Applied to this case, motivated reasoning helps explain why someone who has supported a manager for years may not assess all the information concerning that person by the same standard. Information consistent with the positive judgment built over time may be accepted relatively easily, precisely because it confirms something already believed to be true. A negative report, by contrast, challenges that conviction and may be examined much more severely: greater attention is given to its reliability, to the circumstances in which the problem arose, or to the credibility of the person reporting it.
This is exactly what makes the phenomenon so interesting: we can be entirely sincere while finding excellent reasons not to change our minds.
Protecting a manager or protecting a decision?
In the 1970s, organizational behavior scholar Barry Staw began studying a phenomenon that would become central to research on decision making: escalation of commitment.
The concept describes the tendency to continue investing in a decision already made even when evidence begins to suggest that it should be reconsidered. The issue becomes even more interesting when the person deciding whether to continue is the same person who supported the original choice.
In the years that followed, social psychologist Joel Brockner expanded the literature on escalation of commitment, focusing in part on the role of self-justification. Abandoning a decision in which we have invested does not simply mean giving up what we have built. It may also mean admitting that our initial judgment was wrong.
Applied to managerial careers, this mechanism takes on particular significance. An important promotion rarely depends on one isolated decision. Over the years, a person may be selected for increasingly important roles, supported through successive career steps, and presented as deserving of further trust. Each advancement strengthens the previous one and at the same time, draws in the credibility of those who approved it.
When serious concerns later emerge about that manager's behavior, removing them means more than replacing someone who is not working out. It may require acknowledging that a choice supported over time should have been questioned earlier.
This is where escalation of commitment becomes particularly useful to our argument: continuing to defend the manager may become, at least in part, a way of continuing to defend the decision to believe in them.
"They have always behaved perfectly well with me"
There is a phrase that often appears when problematic behavior is reported about people who enjoy an excellent reputation: "It has never happened with me."
The fact that someone behaves appropriately with a person who holds more power does not necessarily tell us how they behave with those who hold less.
The unequal distribution of power should, in fact, make us cautious about generalizing from personal experience. A superior may know a very different version of the manager from the one known by that manager's employees, without either experience necessarily being false.
If, however, the person responsible for judging the situation gives greater weight to their own direct experience, "I know them well," accounts coming from lower levels of the organization risk being treated as exceptions to the person they believe they know. This is how a reputation can become surprisingly resistant to evidence.
When bad news travels up the hierarchy
There is another issue to consider: negative information does not always circulate within an organization as easily as positive information.
“In social psychology, this is known as the MUM effect, or keeping mum about unwanted messages.” It describes the reluctance to communicate bad news, particularly when doing so may have unpleasant consequences for the person delivering it. Later studies observed the same mechanism within organizational hierarchies, where the difference in power between the person holding the information and the person meant to receive it can influence how that information is communicated.
This becomes especially relevant when the problem concerns a manager who already enjoys a strong reputation at senior levels. What employees experience every day may travel up the hierarchy in increasingly cautious language, reaching the top in a much more diluted form.
The process can unfold without any deliberate attempt to conceal what is happening because the person delivering the bad news knows they are speaking about someone more powerful, perhaps someone supported by the very person to whom the problem must be reported. That alone may be enough to shape how the situation is described.
A curious distance then begins to emerge: what is already regarded as an obvious problem at lower levels may appear far less serious as it moves upward through the hierarchy.
If that softened information then clashes with a positive judgment built over years, we return to the motivated reasoning discussed earlier. It becomes easier to understand how the same manager can be perceived in radically different ways depending on the position from which they are observed.
What if the problem also lies with the person who made the choice?
This brings us to an issue that receives far less attention in discussions of toxic leadership. When an organization keeps someone in a position of power despite repeated problems, concentrating all attention on that manager's characteristics risks making us overlook an important part of the story because, sooner or later, we also need to examine those who continue to support them.
When an organization protects a manager it has many reasons to question, it may not be protecting only that person. It may also be protecting the belief that choosing them was the right decision.
This is probably one of the hardest aspects to recognize because it shifts the problem from the behavior of one individual to the organization's ability to revisit its own decisions. Identifying a problematic manager is relatively simple when we observe them from the outside. It becomes far more difficult when that person was selected, promoted, and supported by the very people now expected to judge them.
Ultimately, the quality of an organization is not measured only by its ability to choose the right people. It is also measured by the freedom it preserves to recognize when a choice was wrong and to correct it before the most competent people are the ones who pay the price.
Read more from Barbara Suigo
Barbara Suigo, HR Consultant, Author & Independent Researcher in Organisational Behaviour
Barbara Suigo is an Italian-French author, HR consultant, and independent researcher specialising in power dynamics and organisational behaviour. She is the author of five books. Her work explores charisma, organisational psychology, manipulation, and the abuse of power in the workplace, making complex international research accessible through books, articles, interviews, and podcasts.
