Why Petty IT Tyrants Are the Real Enemy of Cybersecurity, Productivity, and Innovation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite purportedly acting in the best interests of the organization, many Information Technology (IT) managers succumb to desires for control and power that result in behavior that is detrimental to employees and, ultimately, the organization as a whole. Drawing from Ashforth’s seminal work on petty tyranny, we highlight the unique dynamics of IT-related tyranny, characterized by micromanagement and arbitrary control over user activities. Employing models that both illustrate petty tyranny emergence and delineate the lifecycle of IT petty tyranny, this work describes how individual predispositions and organizational factors catalyze and perpetuate tyrannical behaviors. In addition, we examine the harmful effects of IT petty tyranny on employee morale, productivity, and even organizational cybersecurity. We conclude with practical advice on how organizations can recognize and mitigate IT petty tyranny to avoid negative outcomes for employees and the organization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".