Honest question. How much of this is cultural or psychological? Can people be trained not to take so much shit from bosses or automatically make the company's problems their problems?
I ask because at my current job, a lot of work is explicitly motivated by the threat of getting yelled at or publicly shamed in some way. I often wonder if these stressful interactions could just be handled politely but in a way that doesn't automatically turn into work that gets handled invisibly or passed down the chain to some other poor sap.
I can't speak for whether or not this behavior can be trained "out" but I can share what I have noticed and my own personal experiences.
On the part of people being trained, as I mentioned in another comment, I've seemed to notice that a lot of my Indian and Chinese coworkers, for probably cultural reasons, seem to have this sort of "respect the decisions of 'elders'" mentality and see it as extremely confrontational to disagree with decisions even if in their personal experience they know or have faith that it won't work.
My personal issue was always that I didn't actually know enough about my domain (distributed systems/"backend") to sometimes refute decisions that I had a gut feeling were bad (for example, never had seen anything like a proposed solution being done that way in the open source community or outside of our team -> red flags starting to go off), or that the people who were in my management chain or even more senior coworkers, would refuse to teach/mentor me or even point me toward the correct learning resources.
I ended up spending about 3 years of my free time outside of work learning as much as I could about these subjects (operating system internals, database engines, learning the network stack inside and out, distributed systems primitives, etc etc).
What did I find once I actually started questioning people based on this new knowledge I had? Not a lot of them actually knew what they were talking about. They either couldn't teach me because they themselves didn't know, or they were just afraid to say that they didn't know these things and didn't want to look "stupid".
Long story short, this was the "process" that personally made me extremely confident in being able to call people out on their bullshit since I actually had the means to defend myself objectively.
As a side note, going through this process of intense learning also made me realize that _most_ people don't know any of these things but like to talk as if they do, rather than just admit that they're not experts or unfamiliar with it...
Your last point is spot on. Lots of successful people are simply good at faking it and not getting called out. This is good and bad. Good if you know how to play the system. Bad because it means our system is run by a lot of people who don’t know what they’re doing.
I disagree, from most of my experience, toxic managers take advantage of the people they feel they CAN take advantage of.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's spiteful managers like you're hinting at, but from my experience at two major tech companies, a healthy two-way respect is earned by pushing back on management when they're out of line, as I think they know a lot of the time that they're being out of line but they can get away with it.
That's what I'm getting at. In my own experience, unhandled grudges against people end up being a major source of stress. Some people (my past self included) don't know how to stand up for themselves at a company. It's a combination of knowing what lines people can't cross with you, and what sorts of authority different people at work can have over you, because when someone crosses a line, how you correct them will differ according to their relation to you. For example, if a manager is rude to you, you can often excuse yourself but can't completely drop the issue, whereas, if a fellow collaborator is rude, sometimes you can just stop dealing with them altogether. Sometimes just looking perturbed without saying anything is enough to make people change how they deal with you. A lot of developers I see don't pay any attention to these things and nurse grudges against people for entire years.
It's hard to evaluate a percentage, especially since culture and psychology are intertwined. However, there's much research going on about resilience in several contexts, and as far as I know, there are ways to take it easier, however there tends to be cultural factors at stake.
Anyways, while teaching resilience could be interesting, imo we should also make the world a place where we need less of it, for both moral and practical reasons : not everyone may be able to develop enough resilience to deal with it.
cultural predispositions are difficult to change in the short term. Human psychology, otoh, is _extremely_ difficult to change. This, of course, is why people employ these tactics.
I ask because at my current job, a lot of work is explicitly motivated by the threat of getting yelled at or publicly shamed in some way. I often wonder if these stressful interactions could just be handled politely but in a way that doesn't automatically turn into work that gets handled invisibly or passed down the chain to some other poor sap.