This is one of those “words are slippery” moments.
Signaling is about displaying traits that can be interpreted by an outside agent as correlating strongly with another desired or undesired trait.
In this case, the signaller (the manager) is attempting to signal a desired trait (leadership ability) by displaying a behavior that our evolutionary ancestry has primed us to see as correlated with it (domination of subordinates). If we accept the premise that we need to separate this kind of signaling from the kind of signal that someone with actual leadership ability would perform, then the closest analogy to what we’re seeing here is mimicry (since we have a specimen that does not possess the leadership ability, but still possesses the traits that produce the domination signal).
This is one of those “words are slippery” moments.
Signaling is about displaying traits that can be interpreted by an outside agent as correlating strongly with another desired or undesired trait.
In this case, the signaller (the manager) is attempting to signal a desired trait (leadership ability) by displaying a behavior that our evolutionary ancestry has primed us to see as correlated with it (domination of subordinates). If we accept the premise that we need to separate this kind of signaling from the kind of signal that someone with actual leadership ability would perform, then the closest analogy to what we’re seeing here is mimicry (since we have a specimen that does not possess the leadership ability, but still possesses the traits that produce the domination signal).