For those who fear they are guilty of work jerkery, she advises asking for feedback from co-workers in the same way you’d confront a jerk. “Ask people what they think of your specific behaviors — did I give you enough time on that document? Do you feel I gave you the opportunity to speak up in the meeting? Create a habit of asking for that daily feedback and do it in front of a lot of people, so everyone else starts doing it as well. By creating that structure and a system of small daily low-level things, people won’t be afraid to give you feedback.”

West says stress can drive people into what she calls “accidental jerk territory” and confesses that the pressure of leading an office reorganization once made her a bulldozer boss. “Everybody hated me,” she admits. By sharing her failings in the book, “I wanted to throw myself under the bus to get people to have a little more humility,” she says.

“Most of us have an inner jerk. This isn’t a bad apple issue. This isn’t a personality defect issue,” says West. Most people don’t mean to be ogres. They try to be good bosses but, for example, pressure from the top makes them micromanage. Worse, an organization’s structural flaws encourage people to misbehave. Her next book, “Job Therapy,” explores reasons people are unsatisfied at work and comes out next year.

Thanks to the growth of remote work, it’s harder to detect a jerk, she says. People no longer cross-pollinate in person and are unable to see who creates the social glue — or mud — that helps or hurts organizations.

“It’s not an employee’s burden to fix mean people,” she says. “But at the same time don’t assume other people are going to care about your problem. It’s your burden and your responsibility to learn how to communicate to fix it. That’s the safest strategy.”