Some people think tough bosses whose behavior might be viewed as angry and antagonistic — such as calling people out and placing blame, making threats or delivering ultimatums or being abrasive or blunt — are simply demanding and competent. Others may think such antagonistic managers lack leadership skills.

So why do different people have different perceptions of the same behavior, with some seeing a powerful and demanding boss as strong and others seeing him or her as needing more maturity, self control and better training?

Participants were asked to evaluate the past behavior of 10 well-known CEOs, including Apple's Tim Cook, General Motors' Mary Barra and Disney's Bob Iger.

The answer appears to depend on how a person sees the world, particularly the world of work, according to researchers at Columbia Business School. Some view the world of work as a social jungle where only the fittest survive. Theirs is a competitive worldview.

Others tend to see the work world more benignly — as a collaborative and basically caring place where people work together toward shared goals. Employees with this perspective have a cooperative worldview. Their experience of an aggressive, antagonistic boss is quite different from that of employees who view the world of work as competitive and dog-eat-dog.

The researchers found that people who consider work as a competition were more likely than those who see it more cooperatively to view demanding and volatile managers and leaders as competent. Workers with a competitive worldview were also more likely to view these behaviors as more effective than collaborative behaviors.

“In other words, beastly is in the eye of the beholder,” Christine Nguyen, lead author on the study, told TheDoctor.

“Antagonistic leaders might be excused, endured and even celebrated by those who work for them, allowing them to attain and remain in position of power.”

The study involved a series of seven experiments with more than 2,000 participants. In one of the experiments, participants were asked to evaluate the past behavior of 10 well-known CEOs, including Apple's Tim Cook, General Motors' Mary Barra and Disney's Bob Iger. Those who had a competitive worldview believed that these leaders must have used confrontational tactics in the past to help them succeed.

“Antagonistic leaders might be excused, endured and even celebrated by those who work for them, allowing them to attain and remain in position of power,” coauthor Daniel Ames, a social psychologist and professor of management at Columbia Business School, said in a statement.

Nguyen and Ames asked participants to rate their own managers in another of the experiments. Participants who had a largely competitive worldview were more likely than those with a cooperative worldview to choose to work for an antagonistic manager and less likely to leave.

“This finding suggests worldview can play a role in shaping workplace culture and the composition of the workforce,” said Nguyen, a doctoral student at Columbia. It also helps explain how and why some leaders succeed, despite antagonistic or off-putting behavior.

Future studies might try to determine if managers hire selectively for people with similar worldviews and how that might affect workplace culture and to explore how employees assimilate, or adopt, the worldview of their managers, Nguyen added.

The study is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.