Passive-aggressive behavior
indirect expression of hostility
Passive-aggressive behavior is a communication that in the mind of the speaker is based on a strong negative emotion such as anger but is expressed using words that do not convey the emotion, including completely avoiding direct communication when it is socially customary. Such behavior can be effective to avoid confrontation, rejection, and criticism but can be confusing, annoying, and exasperating to a recipient of the communication due to the discordance between what they hear and what they perceive.
Passive-aggressive behavior was first defined clinically by Colonel William C. Menninger during World War II in the context of soldiers' reactions to military compliance. Menninger described soldiers who were not openly defiant but expressed their civil disobedience (what he called "aggressiveness") by "passive measures, such as pouting, stubbornness, procrastination, inefficiency, and passive obstructionism" due to what Menninger saw as an "immaturity" and a reaction to routine military stress.
Passive–aggressive personality disorder can be described as a personality trait marked by a pervasive pattern of negative attitudes and characterized by passive, sometimes obstructionist resistance to complying with expectations in interpersonal or occupational situations. This includes behaviors such as condescension, belittling, snubbing, subtly insulting insinuations, contrarianism, procrastination, stubbornness, sabotage, the silent treatment, victim playing, sarcasm, resentment, sullenness, or deliberate/repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is responsible.
An outdated definition rejected by the American Psychiatric Association is as follows: Passive-aggressive behavior is characterized by a habitual pattern of non-active resistance to expected work requirements, opposition, sullenness, stubbornness, and negative attitudes in response to requirements for normal performance levels expected by others. Most frequently it occurs in the workplace, where resistance is exhibited by indirect behaviors such as procrastination, forgetfulness, and purposeful inefficiency, especially in reaction to demands by authority figures, but it can also occur in interpersonal contexts.
In conflict theory, passive-aggressive behavior can resemble behavior better described as catty, as it consists of deliberate, active, but carefully veiled hostile acts which are distinctively different in character from the non-assertive style of passive resistance.
Passive-aggressive behavior in the workplace can lead to conflict and damage team unity and productivity.
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