Passive-Aggressive, Passive, or Aggressive? The Three Faces of Anger at Work
He never raises his voice. He never misses a deadline outright, either; she just happens to be running fifteen minutes late to the meeting she didn’t want to attend, and the email you needed by Friday somehow lands Monday at 11:58 p.m. Nobody would call him difficult. But everyone on his team can feel it. Many of my most successful, high-performing clients describe these behaviors in members of the teams they manage. But they address it and turn these people’s behaviors around, or do what is necessary. These behaviors undermine culture, goals, and the motivation of the entire team.
Most of us think of anger as all or nothing: you feel it, or you don’t. In practice, anger is really two separate questions layered on top of each other. There’s the emotional experience itself, and there’s the action tendency, the behavior that goes along with it. And that behavior can take strikingly different forms depending on how directly, or indirectly, it gets expressed. As a clinical psychologist and executive coach who works with high-performing professionals, I see all three patterns constantly, often in the same person, depending on who they’re dealing with and how much is at stake.
What we’re actually talking about when we talk about anger
Anger is the feeling. Aggression is the behavior that frequently accompanies it, and aggression is generally defined by intent: an intention to do harm to another person. That intent can be expressed in wildly different ways, from a direct physical act to something so indirect the target barely registers it as hostility at all. Understanding which mode you (or the person across the table from you) default to is often more useful clinically than talking about anger in the abstract, because the mode is what determines the damage.
Aggression and Anger-Out: direct and unmistakable
This is the form most people picture first. Aggressive anger has a clear, direct intention to harm, and it can show up physically (an assault, a slammed door, thrown property) or verbally (a raised voice, a public dressing-down, a scathing email sent at 2 a.m.). In a boardroom, it rarely looks like violence. It looks like the executive who cuts a direct report off mid-sentence in front of the team, or the founder who fires off a hostile reply-all. It’s loud, it’s attributable, and, precisely because it’s so visible, it’s usually the version that gets addressed, through HR, through coaching, through consequence.
Passive anger and Anger-in: the version that goes underground
The second pattern is anger that gets suppressed rather than expressed outward. In the research literature, this is often called anger-in, distinct from anger-out (direct expression) and anger control (Spielberger, 1999). The feeling is fully present, but it’s held, swallowed, or redirected inward rather than towards the person who triggered it. For high performers, this often masquerades as professionalism: staying composed, saying nothing, “handling it like an adult.”
The cost isn’t zero, though. A meta-analysis of prospective studies found that anger and hostility are broadly associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease, both in initially healthy people and in those who already had this condition (Chida & Steptoe, 2009). Composure on the outside doesn’t mean the physiological load disappears; it often means it’s being paid somewhere else, at 3 a.m., or in your cardiovascular system.
Passive-aggressive anger: hostility with plausible deniability
This is the pattern described in the story that opened this piece, and it’s the one clients most often struggle to name. Passive-aggressive anger indirectly expresses hostility rather than confronting it. Instead of a direct threat or a raised voice, it shows up as spreading rumors about a colleague, quietly saying negative things behind someone’s back, or intentionally dragging your feet when someone is depending on you to move quickly. The intent to cause harm is still there, the same expectation that the behavior will eventually cost the other person something, but it’s indirect enough that it rarely gets named, let alone addressed.
This overlaps heavily with what researchers call indirect or relational aggression: aggression that aims to damage someone’s social status or relationships rather than their body, and that tends to be chosen precisely because it’s lower-cost and harder to pin on the aggressor (Archer & Coyne, 2005). That’s exactly what makes this type of anger corrosive in professional settings. Nobody can write you up for being fifteen minutes late once. But a pattern of it, alongside missed CCs, lukewarm feedback in the room, and the sharper version in private, adds up to real damage that’s genuinely difficult to hold anyone accountable for.
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Why this matters more, not less, for high performers
Executives and senior professionals are often the *most* likely to default to the passive or passive-aggressive pattern. Direct confrontation carries real reputational risk when you’re managing a board, a team, or a professional image built on being unflappable. So the anger doesn’t disappear; it just finds a lower-visibility channel. This is part of why workplace hostility is so hard to manage organizationally. When researchers have tried to sort it into tidy boxes, incivility, bullying, social undermining, abusive supervision, the outcomes for targets don’t line up neatly by category (Hershcovis, 2011). In other words, “minor” and indirect doesn’t reliably mean less damaging, which is exactly why the passive-aggressive pattern shouldn’t get a pass just because no single incident looks serious on its own.
Left unaddressed, this plays out in predictable ways with my clients: the executive whose team is quietly disengaging from someone they experience as impossible to read, the founder whose co-founder relationship is eroding through a thousand small delays rather than one clean disagreement, the physician or attorney whose sharp private commentary about colleagues never quite makes it into a direct conversation where it could actually be resolved.
A quick way to tell which pattern you’re in
Anger-out
The anger is visible in the moment: raised voice, blunt confrontation, a message sent in the heat of it.
Anger-in
The anger is real but stays entirely internal. Outwardly composed, inwardly simmering, often for hours or days after the trigger.
Passive-aggressive
The anger leaks out sideways, through delay, sarcasm, exclusion, or commentary made to everyone except the person it’s actually about.
Most people aren’t purely one type. The pattern often shifts depending on who holds more power in the relationship, a boss versus a direct report, a client versus a colleague, which is itself diagnostic information worth paying attention to.
What actually helps
1) Name the pattern before you try to change it.** You can’t work with a behavior you haven’t accurately identified. Passive-aggressive anger, in particular, is often invisible to the person expressing it.
2) Build direct-expression skills, deliberately.** Assertiveness training, a structured, evidence-based approach to expressing needs and limits clearly without aggression or avoidance, is well established for exactly this gap.
3) Separate the feeling from the behavior.** Feeling angry is not the problem. The unmanaged, indirect expression of it usually is.
4) Address it early, while it’s still one conversation.** Passive-aggressive dynamics compound. What could have been a five-minute direct conversation becomes a pattern that takes months to unwind.
For executives specifically, this is often where executive coaching or anger management work does its most concrete good: building the direct-expression muscle in a setting where the reputational stakes of practicing it are low.
When to get support
If you recognize yourself, or someone you manage, in the passive-aggressive pattern and it’s affecting a key working relationship, a partnership, or your own health, it’s worth addressing directly rather than waiting for it to resolve on its own. It rarely does.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is passive-aggressive behavior a diagnosable condition?
No. It’s a behavior pattern, not a clinical diagnosis, though it can coexist with anxiety, depression, or difficulty with direct conflict that are very treatable.
Is passive anger actually healthier than aggressive anger?
Not necessarily. It’s less disruptive to bystanders in the moment, but anger and hostility, regardless of how they’re expressed, have been linked to increased cardiovascular risk (Chida & Steptoe, 2009).
Can someone unlearn passive-aggressive patterns?
Yes. Because it’s a learned communication and coping strategy rather than a fixed trait, it responds well to structured approaches like assertiveness training and cognitive-behavioral work.
How do I address passive-aggressive behavior in someone I work with?
Name the specific behavior and its impact directly and non-punitively, rather than the inferred motive behind it. “The last two deliverables came in after the deadline we agreed on” is addressable. “You’re doing this on purpose to undermine me” invites defensiveness instead of change.
The Bottom Line on Passive-aggressive Behavior
Anger itself isn’t the problem. How it gets expressed, aggressively, passively, or passive-aggressively, is what determines the damage it does to your relationships, your team, and your own health. The passive-aggressive pattern is the hardest to catch precisely because it’s built to be deniable. Naming it accurately is the first, and often the hardest, step toward changing it.
*This article is for educational purposes and isn’t a substitute for personalized professional care.*
About the author
Dr. J. Ryan Fuller, Ph.D., is a New York State licensed clinical psychologist (License #017108, NPI 1871712653) and executive coach in Manhattan, specializing in evidence-based CBT and coaching for high-performing professionals.
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References
Archer, J., & Coyne, S. M. (2005). An integrated review of indirect, relational, and social aggression. *Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9*(3), 212-230. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0903_2
Chida, Y., & Steptoe, A. (2009). The association of anger and hostility with future coronary heart disease: A meta-analytic review of prospective evidence. *Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 53*(11), 936-946. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacc.2008.11.044
Hershcovis, M. S. (2011). “Incivility, social undermining, bullying…oh my!”: A call to reconcile constructs within workplace aggression research. *Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32*(3), 499-519. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.689
Spielberger, C. D. (1999). *Professional manual for the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2)*. Psychological Assessment Resources.
Phone: 646-693-3760
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Last updated: 7/27/2026