Environmental Assholes

Professor Sutton defines "assholes" in his book "The No Asshole Rule" as people with the following characteristics:

• Humiliate others
• Demean others
• De-motivate/de-energize others

Personally, I am a believer of Theory Y where I assume most people (colleagues) are ambitious, self-motivated, anxious to seek and accept responsibility. However, there are scenarios where good people will turn into nasty way becoming "assholes" temporarily, willingly or unwillingly, and I would call them as "environmental assholes". In such cases, people are unmotivated, unwilling to take responsibility with little ambition (i.e. Theory X).

One of the causes for creating "environmental assholes" is the out of controlled environment (A Chinese idiom from a renowned author, Gu Long (古龍), best describes this: 人在江湖，身不由己). For example, when a organization is full of "death-march" projects (Note), people tend to act irrationally in order to survive.

I used to work in an organization where it had a harmonic working atmosphere with little office politics and most colleagues were hardworking and ambitious. An effective matrix organization structure was adopted to manage IT projects with project teams composed of different functional groups. In theory, other than the conventional technical challenges, there should be little project problems from "human factors".
However, for some reasons, the departments had to manage a lot of large-scale death march projects simultaneously where most of the colleagues believe low project successful rate. Project team-members faced lots of impractical deadlines. Some of the colleagues left to avoid the lousy situation and these worsened the situation with lesser resources for the remaining colleagues. As a result, the original "cooperative & supportive" modes among members turned into "disunited & self-protective" modes. People looked for the ways to survive (to meet their own deadlines) and they ignored about others' needs, even though they were all working for the same projects. Everyone competed for resources, and declined responsibilities. The old days of the harmonic environment was finally turned into a tough, competitive, nasty working environment. Many nice people became nasty jerks of "environmental assholes". It was an unfortunate situation but nobody could manage it.

Note: According to Yourdon, a "death-march" project is project whose "project parameters" exceed the norm by at least 50% such as the compressed schedule, under-resources, reduction in the budget, substantial increase in the scope. In short, a death-march project is project with more than 50% probability of failure.