Inflection Point: Work's Bad Girls

Armed with a Ph.D. in health-care administration, Linda Leavell felt prepared for any problems in her new job as an executive at a community hospital in the West. But shortly after she arrived, she began hearing unwelcome news about another female executive at the hospital. "People who reported to me started coming back and saying they were nervous about what she was asking them," says Leavell. "She was questioning them about the directions I was giving." Leavell soon found out why: the woman was using the information in an attempt to discredit her in the eyes of the hospital's CEO. Despite a confrontation, the woman continued her behavior. Finally, Leavell left not only the job but the state. Says she, now an administrator at a hospital in Redding, Calif.: "I felt like I couldn't focus on the goals and mission that I had in front of me because I constantly had to look over my shoulder."

It is a basic tenet of business-world feminism that women are more collegial than combative males, that sisterhood is powerful. But a thought-provoking, politically incorrect new book turns that conventional wisdom upside down. If colleagues are sisters, the book holds, then look out: the workplace will be fraught with rivalry and dysfunction, because women often betray and undermine one another. (Think Linda Tripp.) "Without fail, in 20 years of conducting conferences and workshops about gender differences in business, almost every participant we've encountered has acknowledged that women damage other women's career aspirations," write authors Pat Heim and Susan Murphy, with Susan Golant, of In the Company of Women: Turning Workplace Conflict into Powerful Alliances (Tarcher/Putnam; $24.95).

Heim and Murphy, veterans of FORTUNE 500 companies, say they decided to write the book when they realized that "women consistently failed to support other women and even actively undermined their authority and credibility."

Heim and Murphy are not shy about using words or taking positions that are bound to generate controversy. Take the term catfight, which they say refers to "the incontrovertible truth" that when women work together, they often clash. Catfights include spreading malicious gossip and rumors, divulging secrets and surreptitiously attacking one another in the presence of others, particularly bosses. In fact, the book was originally titled From Catfights to Colleagues until the authors ran into resistance to the C word. "Men and women are not the same," says Murphy. "We're different biologically, and we're different in personal relationships, and we're also different at work. But different can mean good."

The core idea of the book is the so-called Power Dead-Even Rule, the theory that for two women to forge a positive relationship, their self-esteem and power must be kept "dead even." When one woman gets more power--through a promotion, for example--it sets off tensions. Women sometimes try to redress those status differences, the authors say, through hostility and sniping. The cure for a troubled workplace is to deal honestly with these feelings of competition. The authors say, "From our observations, women are somewhat more comfortable with a powerful woman who plays down her importance than one who does not."