Human resources: bad bosses are not a good thing.

It's no secret that bad bosses prompt a lot of managers to consider greener pastures. How serious is the situation? According to the Web site, Badboss ology.com, 71 percent of people completing a survey on its site this past spring said they were looking for a new job in response to a problem with their boss.

Obviously, you wouldn't want to extrapolate that number to the general workforce; people responding at the site were presumably self-selecting. But the lesson bears repeating, says site co-founder Gary Lahey: "In view of the significant costs of turnover to both companies and the people who leave, this result should remind all executives to be vigilant in building and maintaining a culture that protects people from bad bosses and rewards good bosses."

More generally, other surveys indicate that some 40 percent of employees have had to deal with a bad boss. And a Gallup survey of over one million employees found that if a company is losing good people, more than any other single reason, the cause is their immediate supervisor. Gallup also found that poorly managed workgroups are an average of 50 percent less productive and 44 percent less profitable than well-managed groups.

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Badbossology.com's sponsors say material is drawn from sources such as The Chicago Tribune, CNNMoney.com, Fast Company, The Harvard Business School and The Wall Street Journal's Career Journal.com.