4: The Recipient Profile
The author asserts that people "Don't like to be thought of as a victim" trapped by circumstances they are helpless to overcome. (EN: I can't entirely disagree - in our current culture, people love to play the victim and tell their tales of woe.) But at the same time, people fall into the role of the victim - the "hope, cope, and compromise" model discussed in the previous chapter is evidence of a person who has accepted the situation and is adapting their own behavior to accommodate it.
This is "the recipient profile," which complement and enables the tyrant. People in this role will fall into a number of negative and counterproductive behaviors: they will focus on avoiding blame, assume a victim mentality, base decisions on emotions rather than reason, act on assumptions, focus on immediate and short-term consequences, and lose personal engagement and productivity.
The author presents a case-study to illustrate the point that assuming the victim mentality can become self-fulfilling: a group of workers on one shift came to the HR office with a complaint about their boss - they felt he was riding them, and this was exacerbated by the fact that they were not getting the same bonus pay as workers on another shift. On further investigation, it was found that the complaining workers had lower productivity, a higher error-rate in their work, and a poorer record of safety. As such, the shift boss was motivated by this performance issue to provide more coaching to the poorly-performing shift.
(EN: I think this is insufficient detail to draw a conclusion. While the author seems to imply that the negative attitude of the workers affected their performance and that, in effect, they brought it upon themselves. That seems plausible, but it doesn't consider the methods the supervisor used to "encourage" them to do better - and it's also reasonable to conclude that the manager's methods were unsound. Ultimately, this points to the notion of a vicious circle: the workers perform poorly, the boss uses inappropriate methods to motivate them, the workers perform more poorly, the boss takes more drastic measures to provide motivation, and so on, as all of them become more deeply ingrained in negative behaviors.)
The author suggests that breaking out of a recipient role requires the worker to think collaboratively which will be discussed later (chapter nine) - but in the meantime, merely to recognize the behaviors that precipitate from the recipient role and to avoid falling into those patterns of behavior that will perpetuate and exacerbate the problem.
This also requires thinking "outside ourselves," to step back from the hurt and resentment we feel at another person's behavior to consider our own, and to identify patterns of behavior that should be discontinued.
The author presents an exercise in which readers are encouraged to consider a number of tyrant behaviors and consider how they react to them - how they feel, what thy think, and how they act when they encounter a given behavior.
The list of behaviors in itself is interesting: the tyrant demonstrates anger, is patronizing or condescending, attempts to humiliate workers, ignores their input, demonstrates indifference, acts arrogantly, shows contempt, threatens or bullies, acts vindictively, is underhanded or manipulative, lies or feigns ignorance, etc.
The point of the exercise is to build awareness of reactions to specific behaviors, to consider whether they are effective in addressing or mitigating the problem, or are merely accommodating or encouraging them.