Dominance Is Like a Chocolate Factory: How Dominance-Environment Reward and the Dominance Meme Loop Destroy Organizations

This paper redefines workplace anger and coercive control not merely as individual emotional expression, personality traits, or failures of self-regulation, but as part of a broader process in which dominance desire transforms an organization into a reward-producing environment. Previous research has examined abusive supervision, workplace bullying, psychological safety, organizational silence, emotional contagion, and the behavioral effects of power. However, less attention has been paid to why forms of control that are inefficient for the organization may nevertheless persist as rewarding experiences for the dominant leader. Building on the Anger-as-Indulgence Model, which conceptualizes anger as an emotionally rewarding resource, this paper shifts attention from anger itself to the dominance environment that continuously produces anger. If anger is like chocolate, offering immediate emotional reward through silencing others, controlling the situation, and confirming one’s own correctness, then dominance desire is the chocolate factory that keeps producing it. In dominance-oriented workplaces, subordinates’ self-esteem, autonomy, professional agency, and horizontal trust are gradually depleted. As a result, organizational learning, psychological safety, technical continuity, and mutual trust are weakened. Yet this very weakening can increase the leader’s centrality, perceived necessity, and sense of control. To explain this paradox, the paper introduces two concepts: dominance-environment reward and the dominance meme loop. Dominance-environment reward refers to the continuing psychological reward obtained when an organization is arranged so that subordinates become dependent on the leader for permission, judgment, approval, and validation. The dominance meme loop describes the self-reinforcing cycle in which diminished autonomy and self-esteem among subordinates make the leader appear more necessary, thereby justifying further control. The paper also introduces the concept of apparent dominance conversion. Rather than attempting to infer the leader’s subjective intention, this perspective focuses on how the organization appears to function from the outside. Even when a leader subjectively frames their behavior as instruction, safety management, or developmental guidance, if the observable consequences include silence, fear, backstage complaints, withdrawal, turnover, and imitative aggression, the organization may be functioning as a dominance-reward system. The central conclusion is that anger is chocolate, but dominance desire is the factory that produces it. When an organization begins to function as that factory, it does not necessarily collapse loudly or immediately. It quietly loses autonomy, trust, learning capacity, and professional vitality.