In the first of a new series for AMBITION, Martyn Griffin and Mark Learmonth will delve into the media’s representation of leadership and management in TV and film. Part one explores the negative connotations: psychopathic, mean, and bossy
‘Hey! Quit stalling, get back to work! Go on!’
(Modern Times, 1936)
Over the past century TV and cinema have provided us with a multitude of wonderful representations of bosses in the workplace. Indeed, from the earliest days of cinema whether it was through a tyrannical, controlling factory-owner in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) or later, through a seedy, manipulative manager in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), it became clear quickly that ‘the boss’ was ripe for characterisation.
And yet, these interpretations of bosses are not plucked out of the ether. They are derived from the experience of screenwriters, directors and actors as they draw upon bosses that they have encountered in their everyday lives. Neither are these representations viewed passively: they are interpreted, often in unintended ways. In our research over the past decade, we have sought to argue that this fact and fiction of managerial life feeds one another in a loop, resulting in an ongoing cultivation of social and cultural understanding of what it is to be a boss.
In an effort to explore these fictional representations in more detail a blogpost has been produced covering 100 of our favourite bosses from TV and film. These bosses have been categorised as:
- The psychopathic boss
- The mean boss
- The incompetent boss
- The rule-driven boss
- The greedy boss
- The renegade boss
- The burdened boss
- The heroic boss
- The predatory boss
- The good boss.
In this article – the first of a series of three – to be published by AMBITION, we take a look at three of fictional boss types with a highly negative connotation; those that most people would want to have as their own boss the very least.
‘Lunch is for wimps!’
Gordon Gekko, Wall Street (1987)
One of the most common boss identities portrayed on screen is that of the psychopath. These individuals manage narcissistically, amorally, and solely in pursuit of their own aims and goals. Those individuals most aptly able to show little regard for the feelings or well-being of others somewhat inevitably and so often seem to rise to the top. The earliest examples of psychopathic bosses in cinema tend to be found in Disney animation. We might consider, for example, Pinocchio (1940) in which his evil boss Stromboli threatens to turn him in to fire wood and, of course, Cruella de Vil in Disney’s 101 Dalmatians (1956). In many ways Cruella is the archetypal example of a psychopathic boss, as she uses her employees (two burly henchmen) to stop at nothing to achieve her own distasteful desires.
It was within Oliver Stone’s 1987 classic Wall Street, however, that many of us encountered the most famous film boss psychopath of all time: Gordon Gekko. Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) mentors a young, up-and-coming stockbroker Bud, teaching him the ins-and-outs of insider trading to manipulate and buy up stock to turn large profits – often at great expense for the companies and the jobs of the people who work within them. Gekko does so callously and without remorse, at one stage when being asked why he had to wreck a company he responds ‘Because its wreckable, that’s why!’. Gekko is reflective of a style of management in which to be seen as successful it is not enough to make money, there is also an insatiable need to dominate, exploit and, if possible, destroy all those that stand in the way.
‘Family, religion, friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business.’
Montgomery Burns, The Simpsons (1989)
Related to psychopathic bosses, but not nearly as bad, are mean bosses. These individuals might not be willing to kill to achieve their goals – they still retain some form of moral compass – but they are quite happy to make life a living hell for any subordinate not willing to fall in to line. This management identity has been popularised and legitimised over the past couple of decades through numerous reality TV shows. Individuals such as Gordon Ramsay (in Hell’s Kitchen [2005] and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares [2007]) epitomise the mean-spirited boss who uses fairly extreme methods including shouting in subordinates faces and brutal character assassination to bend them to his will. It is, for all intents and purposes built around the idea that workers are inherently lazy and require robust and forthright management (as popularised in management theory through Edwin Locke’s ‘Theory X’).
We see many representations of the mean boss within animation, most notably Montgomery Burns, the mean-spirited boss of Springfield power plant, based upon 20th Century magnate J.D. Rockefeller. These managers are often supremely talented and have absolute disdain for anybody who fails to live up to their impossibly high standards. Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada (2000) is another example of this archetype. The film follows Andy – a new female recruit at a fashion magazine – and the savage ways in which Priestly and many other colleagues abuse and ridicule her despite her best efforts and intentions. It has long-been rumoured that Miranda Priestly was based on Variety magazine Editor Anna Wintour (Weisberger worked for Wintour, who apparently has a notorious temper and ruthless attitude with her staff). It is one in the long line of many TV and film representations which show just how uncaring bosses can sometimes be.
‘What are you but a warped, frustrated young man? A miserable little clerk, crawling in here on your hands and knees and begging for help’
Mr Potter, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
In recent years greed has become especially synonymous with bosses. The 2007/8 financial crisis was precipitated and made much worse through the sheer recklessness and unquenchable desire for wealth by management in the finance sector. CEOs and directors of financial institutions even continued to rake in tens of millions of dollars in bonuses all while the taxpayer spent billions bailing out the companies which they had run in to the ground. Representations of bosses as greedy, however, is hardly a new thing. Fictional banker, Mr Potter, and his stern money-grabbing words for George Bailey in the seasonal classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) capture perfectly the attitude of a boss who is only interested in profit rather than people.
In more recent times, films like Margin Call (2011) and The Big Short (2015) have offered insider accounts of the downfall of Lehman Brothers and how, in the latter, finance bosses were able to make huge amounts of money by betting against the housing market – shorting it – so that when the bubble burst, they were in place to make a fortune. Other films such as Michael Winterbottom’s Greed (2020), meanwhile, provide a more satirical critique of lavish billionaire bosses like Sir Philip Green and how his exorbitant wealth has been built with a total disregard for other people and ongoing love affair with money – something that has, rather presciently, played out recently through the downfall of Green’s empire (with thousands of redundancies) but with him walking away relatively unscathed.
However, if many of these representations above were meant as criticisms of these kinds of bosses (whether psychopathic, mean or greedy), audiences often have their own interpretations. When asked about his role as Gordon Gekko Michael Douglas professed great surprise that so many see Gekko not as the villain but as a hero.
Speaking in an interview in 2018 he said: ‘It’s always shocked me how many people on Wall Street say to me, you’re the reason I became a stockbroker.’ Despite every intention of a screenwriter, director or an actor, a character takes on a life of its own once released in to the wider world. It will influence (and be influenced) in ways unimagined and unimaginable at the time of inception. This is the beauty of these characters in TV and film and why they loom large as we think about what it is to be and act like a boss in modern society.
Dr Martyn Griffin (left) is Associate Professor in Management and Marketing, and Mark Learmonth (right) is Professor of Organisation Studies at Durham University Business School.
‘Fiction and the Identity of the Manager’ is a chapter written by Dr Griffin and Professor Learmonth, and published in The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations (pg. 455-470).
You can find Martyn Griffin’s blog at https://www.democracytocome.org/fiction-and-the-identity-of-the-manager/
Next month’s article will explore the incompetent, rule-driven and predatory bosses in TV and film.
