This guy is merely justifying the perpetuation of the "leader as asshole" pathology already deconstructed by people like Robert Sutton.
One old saying that corporations who sign on to the "leader as asshole" approach would do well to remember is "revenge is a dish best eaten cold". Right now, from my own (admittedly anecdotal experience) there are a lot of employees in the USA working for the sort of dysfunctional leaders that this author appears to venerate. Once the economy recovers, I expect that a lot of those employees will execute on their plan to eat a cold dish and will fire their employer (and by extension, the employer's asshole leaders).
I have seen the "leader as asshole" tendency become very deeply ingrained in US business culture over the last 4-5 years. Like all fixed leadership styles, it has a finite shelf-life that is about to be passed.