Idiom for someone who got a tiny fraction of power and abuses it?

Is there any idiom for a person who somehow obtained a (usually small) power to control people and is using it in every possible way to make problems for people around him?

Solution 1:

I don't know how current or widespread this is but one term is 'a little Hitler'. Google ngram: a little Hitler

As the produce of an evident inability to make moral distinctions, Chorover' s verdict shares with such seemingly innocuous and self- deprecatory confessions as "there is a little Hitler in each of us,"

Race and Other Misadventures: Essays in Honor of Ashley Montagu By Larry T. Reynolds, Leonard Lieberman

Solution 2:

A term that is probably restricted to Britain but very widely used here is 'a jobsworth'

A jobsworth is a person who uses their job description in a deliberately uncooperative way, or who seemingly delights in acting in an obstructive or unhelpful manner.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The word comes from a common expression used by such people, e.g.

"Could I park here just for a few minutes? I need to collect an urgent prescription of heart medicine for my mother?"

"No, sorry, it's more than my job's worth to let you do that."

In other words the jobsworth is using the excuse that they will get sacked from their job if they bend the rules even slightly.

Solution 3:

A low-status employee inclined to abuse power within the public domain is sometimes referred to as a petty bureaucrat.

"However, since these petty bureaucrats’ power is almost absolute, they also control the channels for addressing grievances."

"Any system of universal ID, once established, is the slippery slope, it is a short step to then requiring people to have and carry ID cards which petty bureaucrats and police can demand at will."

Examples from Globse.

Abuse from a petty bureaucrat may express itself as simple disregard or lack of consideration, passive aggression, the imposition of unreasonable obstacles, or outright demeaning behaviour towards a client or customer.

Patrick M (see comments below) suggests petty tyrant as another common idiom for a person who abuses his or her power. This American Life devotes a 45 minute broadcast to the story of a particular petty tyrant, a janitor who rose through the ranks to become head of maintenance,

"when he starts messing with his employees. Teasing them at meetings. Punishing them with crummy work assignments. Or worse things like slashing their tires in the middle of night." Patrick M notes that, although the janitor may have started out as a petty tyrant, he turned into a full-blown psychopath.

The petty bureaucrat and the petty tyrant are but two roles taken by people in positions of relative power without status. Abuse of power by people in low status roles may take on grotesque forms such as the demeaning behaviour of soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. See The destructive nature of power without status. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2011) by Nathanael J. Fast, Nir Halevy and Adam D. Galinsky.

The study On the Ethics of Intervention in Human Psychological Research: With Special Reference to the Stanford Prison Experiment (P.D.F.), undertaken by Phillip G. Zimbardo suggests that ordinary people placed in low status, high power positions--temporary prison guards--will carry out abusive behaviour towards innocent peers.

The abuse of power was even more powerfully demonstrated in the classic obedience studies carried out by Stanley Milgram. (Milgram, Stanley. "Behavioral study of obedience". The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67.4 (1963): 371). But who is the greater abuser of power? The experimenter who demands that electric shocks be applied to a victim, or the experimental subject who is placed in the role of a "teacher" who must punish the "student" each time the student makes a mistake on a trivial word-pair memorisation task?

Solution 4:

Drunk with power. It's pretty self explanatory and applies universally to the obnoxious and abusive wielding of power, no matter how big or small.

In a work environment context, slave driver is appropriate because it's describing one with authority over another in reference to all the scummy negatives that come along with the implication of being involved in the slave trade.

In a general context, "surprised he/she can get their head through the door" may also be appropriate, referring to the inflated ego that these types get when anything complimentary lands in their lap. However, this isn't specific to obtaining power or authority, but it can still apply nicely.

"You see the way Jim has acted since his promotion? I'm surprised he can get his head through the door."