# Example of Passive Aggressiveness: 9 Ways It Shows Up at Work Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors/example-of-passive-aggressiveness/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors/example-of-passive-aggressiveness.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving professional behaviors at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Passive aggressiveness is negative feeling expressed indirectly. Nine concrete examples, how to tell a real slight from a bad day, and what to say instead. ## Key facts - Title: Example of Passive Aggressiveness: 9 Ways It Shows Up at Work - Category: Professional Behaviors - Primary skill: Professional Behaviors - Related skills: Communication, Building Resilience - Primary keyword: example of passive aggressiveness - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors/example-of-passive-aggressiveness/ ## What this page covers - Passive aggressiveness is negative feeling expressed indirectly. Nine concrete examples, how to tell a real slight from a bad day, and what to say instead. - Practical guidance for example of passive aggressiveness - How this topic connects to Professional Behaviors ## Detailed explanation Someone answers your message with three words and a period, and you spend the rest of the afternoon wondering whether you imagined the edge in it. An example of passive aggressiveness is exactly that kind of moment: a negative feeling expressed indirectly instead of said out loud. The silent treatment, a backhanded compliment, "forgetting" a request, agreeing to something and then stalling, sarcasm aimed at a person, a pointed "per my last email." What links them all is the gap between what someone says and what they actually do. That gap is also why these moments are so hard to name while they are happening. Each one is built to be deniable. ## Nine everyday examples of passive aggressiveness These are the forms psychology and workplace sources return to most often, weighted toward work. Each has a shape you can learn to recognize. ### 1. "Per my last email" The written form, and the most common one. The phrase carries an unspoken *you didn't read what I sent*, and it travels in a family: *please advise*, *noted*, *friendly reminder*, *as previously mentioned*, *circling back*, *thanks in advance*. Fast Company reports these ranking at the very top of the phrases recipients read as passive-aggressive, and a Preply survey found that 83% of Americans have received a passive-aggressive email from a coworker. The awkward part is that most of these are also perfectly ordinary business phrases. ### 2. The sandbagged yes Someone agrees and then does not deliver. Not a refusal and not a negotiation — a yes followed by stalling, minimum effort, or a deadline that quietly slips, usually with a cover story about being swamped. The version sources describe outside work is saying "Sure, I'd be happy to" and then brooding through the whole task. The request was never accepted; it was absorbed. ### 3. Strategic forgetting The task is not declined. It is forgotten — repeatedly, and always the same task. Sources describe this as recurrent forgetfulness that ignores a request while claiming it slipped the person's mind. The domestic example that keeps appearing is a partner who "forgets" to fill the car whenever they are annoyed. Genuine forgetting is scattered. This kind is selective, and the selectivity is the tell. ### 4. The backhanded compliment Praise built around an insult, so that objecting makes you look oversensitive. The examples sources actually cite: "Your haircut makes your nose look smaller." "Congratulations on your marriage — I thought it would never happen." At work it usually arrives softer, as surprise that something turned out well, or admiration for how relaxed you seem about a deadline. The compliment is the delivery mechanism, not the point. ### 5. Sarcasm with a target Sarcasm is not automatically passive-aggressive; plenty of good teams run on it. It crosses the line when the intent is to mock or punish someone, and the joke format supplies a permanent escape hatch: "I was joking" is always available afterward. The workplace version sources return to is the sideways workload complaint: "Must be nice to have such an easy workload." That deniability is usually why the moment still felt unresolved an hour later. ### 6. The silent treatment Communication stops, or cools by several degrees, with nothing said about why. At work it looks like replies that now arrive a day later than they used to, one-word answers, and someone who has gone quiet in channels where they used to be present. Sources treat withdrawal as an active move rather than an absence of one, because it is aimed. The distance is created for one particular person. ### 7. Withholding information You find out afterward that you were left off a thread, or that context existed and never reached you. Nobody caused the problem; they simply declined to prevent it. It sits among the workplace-specific forms alongside undermining comments in meetings, and it is more consequential than most of the others here, because the damage lands on your work rather than your mood. ### 8. Sighing, sulking, and avoided eye contact Discontent broadcast without words: heavy sighs, pouting, closed posture, eye contact that never quite arrives. Sources list these alongside the verbal forms rather than beneath them — the same behavior in a different channel. It is also the hardest kind to raise with anyone, because there is no sentence to quote back. Anyone who has tried to describe a sigh to a third party knows how quickly it starts to sound like nothing. ### 9. The dig at a familiar sore spot A topic gets raised that the other person knows is uncomfortable — a rejected proposal, an old mistake, your weight, your dating life — framed as ordinary conversation. The example that appears again and again: you mention to a colleague that you are trying to lose weight, and the next day they bring you cake. Nothing about it is objectionable on its own. The timing is the message. ## Is that really an example of passive aggressiveness? Almost every item on that list has an innocent twin. People genuinely forget things. People genuinely get swamped. "Per my last email" is sometimes just someone under time pressure reaching for a stock phrase, which is why some readers will find their own sent folder full of them. Most articles on this topic catalogue the behavior thoroughly and stay quiet about this part. Two things separate a real pattern from a bad day. The first is repetition: once is an incident, the fifth time is a habit. The second is direction — whether it clusters around one person, one kind of request, or one topic. A colleague who forgets everything has a memory problem. A colleague who only forgets your requests does not. Sources also split on why people do it at all. It can be a deliberate strategy, or it can come from a fear of conflict and a real difficulty saying things directly. From the outside the behavior looks identical — which matters, because someone frightened of confrontation needs a different reply than someone keeping score. ## What to do when it happens Advice sources are more unanimous here than almost anywhere else, and both of their main rules run against instinct. Do not tell the person they are being passive-aggressive. The psychologist Mark Travers, writing in Forbes, and career sources such as Indeed land in the same place: the label triggers defensiveness or a counter-accusation, and the conversation turns into an argument about the word instead of the behavior. Ask what was meant, or name the concrete effect on the work. Something like *I read that as frustration with the timeline — was it?* opens a door that the label closes. Do not reciprocate either. Matching indirectness with indirectness escalates quietly and never brings the actual issue into the room. The third point is the one most people resist. Staying quiet is not neutral. Sources such as Rula are explicit that not speaking up signals the behavior is acceptable, and that changing the pattern means changing your own response rather than waiting for theirs. The instinct to rise above it is understandable. It also tends to buy another six months of the same. ## If you recognized yourself in the list Some readers arrive here checking a suspicion about themselves rather than a colleague. If parts of that list felt uncomfortably familiar, that counts for something — it is the harder direction to look. Almost nobody does this out of malice. It tends to grow in the space where a direct sentence should have gone: a disagreement not voiced, a request not declined, an irritation not raised while it was still small. The fix is not a personality overhaul. It is the ordinary, learnable habit of saying the thing at the time in a way that keeps the relationship intact, and it can help to get a clear read on [where your own habits sit](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before going looking for the pattern in someone else. ## The skills that make this easier to handle What changes the outcome in nearly every example above is not knowing more examples. It is a small number of things you do in the moment — and those turn out to be practicable. **Professional Behaviors** covers the norms that let people work together, and it is unusually specific about the ones that break them. The conduct it flags as unprofessional includes the passive kind, the aggressive kind, and the manipulative kind: indirect communication and talking about people behind their backs. That is a sharper vocabulary than the pop-psychology label, and it answers the question you probably arrived with — this is not a personality clash you are obliged to absorb, but a norm being broken, and norms can be pointed at. **Communication** fills the gap where the indirect version grows. Being clear and direct, saying the thing rather than storing it, raising a disagreement while it is still small — these are what stop a grievance from turning into a run of sighs. It also settles the medium question that the email examples make so concrete: anything sensitive belongs in a conversation, not in a paper trail. Direct is not the same as blunt; keeping it constructive is part of the same set of principles. **Building Resilience** handles the other half, the part that happens in your own head between the remark and your reply. Ambiguous signals are exactly where mind reading and jumping to conclusions do their damage, and this skill treats those as thinking errors with a check attached: what would you tell a friend who described this, and does another explanation fit? It also draws the line around what is actually yours. Someone else's indirectness is theirs. Your response is the part you control. None of the three is a temperament you either have or don't have. They are behaviors, and behaviors move. They also sit inside a wider set of twelve that the free Job Skills Test walks through, so if the honest answer is that you are not sure which part of this you are weakest on, it is worth finding out [which ones are already strong](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). Some of this may already describe how you operate. Plenty of people reach the end of a list like this and realize they have been doing the direct version for years without calling it a skill. Wherever you are starting from, none of it is fixed. These are habits, and habits are the part of yourself you get to author — you do not have to become a different person to stop absorbing snide remarks, or to stop sending them. What does change is the weight. The further into a career you go, the more of the work runs through moments like these — a solvable problem, and a quick one to get a read on. You looked this up instead of firing something back, which is the part most people skip. The remaining question is a smaller one: which of these is already solid for you, and which one is worth a little attention. ## Where to start The only thing left is to find out where you actually stand. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of the twelve work skills this article has been circling — the professional norms, the direct communication, the ability to stay steady when something lands badly, and nine others. It takes about seven minutes and shows which ones are already working for you, and which one or two would make the most difference in situations like the one that brought you here. Nothing to prepare beforehand. **[Take the test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, takes about 7 minutes, and your results appear as soon as you finish.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Passive aggressiveness is negative feeling expressed indirectly. Nine concrete examples, how to tell a real slight from a bad day, and what to say instead. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Professional Behaviors. It also relates to Communication, Building Resilience. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/resilience.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors/example-of-passive-aggressiveness/ Preferred summary: "Passive aggressiveness is negative feeling expressed indirectly. Nine concrete examples, how to tell a real slight from a bad day, and what to say instead." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.