Personally I see throwing a tantrum is something a kid does. If an adult does it, it just seems immature. I've seen executives throw tantrums at their underlings and of course get away with it. However in doing so I'm pretty sure they do lose the respect of a lot of people, at least they lose mine. It may be a cultural thing though.
I'm pretty sure it's a cultural thing, although the word "tantrum" has many meanings, and we might be thinking of different ones.
From what I've seen of the US, being able to get someone angry is a sign of superior status in New York and the Northeast; getting angry is a sign of low status in the Midwest, although being able to get someone angry isn't a sign of high status; while in the South, well, it's a good thing dueling is illegal.
I suspect that this may go back to smooth mercantile Lowlands English versus tempestuous Celts, but I certainly can't prove as much; and most of the Southern aristocracy comes from the West Country, not the Scottish border.
But while these theories help explain why the seemingly diverse convictions within the right-wing and left-wing mind-sets hang together, they don’t explain why they are tied to geography. The historian David Hackett Fischer traces the divide back to the British settlers of colonial America. The North was largely settled by English farmers, the inland South by Scots-Irish herders. Anthropologists have long noted that societies that herd livestock in rugged terrain tend to develop a “culture of honor.” Since their wealth has feet and can be stolen in an eye blink, they are forced to deter rustlers by cultivating a hair-trigger for violent retaliation against any trespass or insult that probes their resolve. Farmers can afford to be less belligerent because it is harder to steal their land out from under them, particularly in territories within the reach of law enforcement. As the settlers moved westward, they took their respective cultures with them. The psychologist Richard Nisbett has shown that Southerners today continue to manifest a culture of honor which legitimizes violent retaliation. ... Admittedly, it’s hard to believe that today’s Southerners and Westerners carry a cultural memory of sheepherding ancestors. But it may not be the herding profession itself that nurtures a culture of honor so much as living in anarchy.
All right! I'm beyond delighted to read this -- to know that there are other fans of Pinker, Fischer, and Nisbett out there! Have you read _Bound Away_ yet? (It's the companion volume Fischer promised at the end of _Albion's Seed_; it doesn't deal with slavery alone, but with Virginia in general.)
Expressed this lucidly, I almost feel that the exception is those without a culture of honor, not those with one -- that the North and not the South is the odd one. After all, while it's hard to drive off land, it's perfectly possible to burn buildings and loot crops... unless the farmers can band together into militias more powerful than the invading army, which the North certainly does.
My anecdotal experience as a Southerner living in the North was that everyone cared about conformity and hierarchy (including seeing where you were in the hierarchy), and was hostile to the South's combination of a hot temper and a live-and-let-live outlook. But you don't want hot heads or amiability in a territorial militia, and you do want a lot of concern with hierarchy; otherwise your militia will be uncontrollable.
You wouldn't happen to be in the Seattle area, would you? I'd love to get together, and to have the chance to talk about these sorts of things in person.
I'm super-sure you are the outlier. Because Gordon Ramsey throws tantrums all the fucking time on his stupid tv shows and people believe he is the best chef in the world still. In fact, it seems Gordon Ramsey's reputation for being a master of his craft has only increased for all the times he has gotten angry on tv.
An executive doesn't care about the respect from some of those underneath them, which is most likely how they became an executive in the first place. Power relationships are rarely about equal respect.
