Is passive-aggressiveness ever okay?

I get annoyed by people who are passive-aggressive. If you have a problem, deal with it explicitly or suck it up.

I’ve given a little thought as to where passive-aggressiveness comes from, though, which makes me wonder: Is passive-aggressiveness ever okay? Why are people passive-aggressive to begin with? Why can’t they just say what their problems are and voice their opinions or objections? Passive-aggressiveness comes, as far as I can tell, from fear of confrontation and the desire to avoid accountability. The benefits of passive-aggressiveness are two-fold. You are able to either keep in the good graces of everyone or at least appear to be in everyone’s good graces. You also cannot be called on your actions. If anyone confronts you, you can plead ignorance.

As an example. Let’s say you yelled at a co-worker in a moment of anger. Rather than the co-worker saying, “Hey, you really hurt me with what you said yesterday when you were yelling,” he just stops being as responsive to your email requests. He also objects to every idea you bring up in meetings when he never used to do that. By taking subtle actions to get back at you for yelling at him, he doesn’t have to confront you with his hurt, and if you say, “I think you’re reacting differently to me than before,” he can continue to act differently and deny it the whole time, “No. I just didn’t happen to agree with you at that meeting. Geez.”

This is, of course, annoying behavior, but it is possible that your co-worker isn’t trying to be annoying or devious. In this case, fear of confrontation may not be a general fear of any kind of confrontation. It may be a fear of confrontation with you. It may be that he doesn’t feel you’ll be receptive to a confrontation (that, in fact, the confrontation will make you angrier than before), or he may feel that you wouldn’t pay attention to a legitimately expressed complaint—in other words, you need to be noticeably inconvenienced in order to realize you might have done something wrong.

The real test of intentions is “the call.” If someone is being initially passive-aggressive, he may feel too timid to bring about a confrontation (either because you’re intimidating, or he is just afraid of confrontation in general), but if, after you bring up the subject, he continues to be passive-aggressive and pretends nothing is wrong, that’s just annoying and beyond justification.