Passive aggressiveness can be much more toxic and hidden that is being let on. My senior lead is a major passive aggressive. He doesn't like to be bothered before say, 11 am because he is not a morning person. If you walk up and ask him something, the tone under his voice is "I want to kill you" but he will say nice words. Then later, work that you know you did right suddenly changes to something wrong just before HIS boss somehow finds out about it and that person who talked to him that am gets in trouble. Most people don't notice it and then have incidents. He just got a new supervisor who is 100% his polar opposite. She talks up a storm and makes loud jokes all morning. Her first week all over her technology, programs, settings, kept getting changed and I could just tell he was secretly fucking up her computer on purpose, then later fix them just before it became an issue where someone with actual talent could figure out that stuff was being manipulated (remote logs, etc).

With me, like clockwork, he will stand up and say something the exact opposite of the way I am, but with conviction so he has plausible deniability 1) he can say he was being opposite as a joke or 2) he can say he was being serious--he does this by waiting until ONE time you have acted out the behavior the way he insulted you, but really he meant the opposite. Example: "Wow, you are so loud all the time." I'm well known to be really really quiet at work but that day I had been giddy for like 5 minutes and had a chat with his boss. So basically he was saying, "why are you so quiet to me but nice to my boss?" Cuz I know, and you know that I know you are a psychotic fuck.

I just try to avoid him and if he does anything to try to spark his passive aggressive retaliation, I just try to defuse it by changing the subject to something he is obsessed about, like cars or sports.