From the moment you start each workday, you’re subject to two basic human impulses: to excel and to conform.
If people in your immediate environment are amazing performers, you might be able to do both at once: By excelling, you fit the norm of your spectacular coworkers. But that’s rare. I’m pretty sure that in most work environments, as soon as you excel, you stop conforming. If you choose a high-performance path, you separate yourself from your coworkers. You’re not quite one of the bunch anymore. No matter how proud you are of your achievements, tell me it doesn’t hurt when you see your old group of friends coming back from a lunch that you somehow hadn’t known about.
I was thinking about this while reading research on the psychological and social effects not of being a high performer but of experiencing an extraordinary event, because the two situations share a few things in common. When something exciting and unusual happens to us, even if it’s random, we’ve excelled, in a way. We’re special. We no longer conform.
The research, by Gus Cooney and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard and Timothy D. Wilson of the University of Virginia, shows that after we go through an extraordinary experience, we assume that we’ll really enjoy telling the tale. But when we try, we often don’t feel so good about it. We feel separate. We sense that the group resents our excellent adventure. The study focused on experiences that are really only slightly extraordinary, such as watching an interesting video, but the results are pretty clear: A special experience distances us from other people, and the responses we see in our peers makes us feel excluded.
Jaclyn M. Jensen, an assistant professor in the Richard H. Driehaus College of Business at DePaul University, has put a different lens on what divides us from our coworkers and why. Along with Pankaj C. Patel of Ball State University and Jana L. Raver of Queen’s University in Canada, Jensen studied a large Midwestern field office of a U.S. financial services firm, using surveys to find out what was going on among coworkers — in the workrooms, during team meetings, in the lunchroom, and on email.
The researchers found that even in a collegial, well-behaved workplace, not only are you perceived as different if you’re a high performer; you’re also sometimes victimized. High-performing employees in this environment scored 3.37 on a 1-to-5 scale of victimization frequency, with 1 representing “never” and 5 representing “once a week or more.” They scored significantly higher on this measure of being victimized than average and poorly performing workers.
Mostly, the victimization was subtle, which is understandable, given the risks of being called out as a bully. So instead of being overtly nasty, people avoid you or withhold resources. Or they schedule important meetings when you happen to be out of town.
It probably goes without saying that there’s no rational logic to the victimization of high performers. After all, if you’re a high performer, by definition you have an outsized impact on the organization, and you help make the workgroup shine. Your victimizers’ incentive pay is probably even based (at least in part) on your achievements.
Still, what’s rational about human behavior? As Jensen pointed out to me, human beings have a pronounced tendency to punish those who violate unspoken norms. Average performers worry that you’re making them look bad. If they can bring you down a notch, they can alleviate (or at least they think they can alleviate) their negative feelings by reminding you what an “acceptable” level of performance looks like.
But one of the more interesting aspects of Jensen’s research is that the covert victimization is spotty — it doesn’t apply to all high performers. Certain achievers are spared the worst of the victimization. These are what Jensen and her colleagues call “benevolent” high performers.
Benevolent high performers are sensitive to what’s fair for other people; they put others’ needs ahead of their own. They’re cooperative, even altruistic at times.
OK, no great news there. But the reality is that high performers too often slip into what Jensen would call “non-benevolence” without even realizing it. They start to feel entitled to their hard-won authority. Sometimes they step on or manipulate others, telling themselves that all’s fair in pursuit of the greater good. Pretty soon they’re consistently putting their own needs first. To measure this, the researchers used the surveys to place employees along a continuum of behavior, with “entitled” at one end and “benevolent” at the other. Here “entitled” means having “low equity sensitivity” — a poor sense of what’s fair to others. (As you can see from the chart, low achievers are victimized too, but the researchers found that there’s a different rationale: Weak performers are punished for jeopardizing their coworkers’ success. Benevolence doesn’t help them much.)
So if you’re a high performer who’s being excluded or cold-shouldered, maybe it’s not so much your excellence that your coworkers are reacting to but your creeping non-benevolence. If they’re not looping you into lunch invites, maybe it’s because they’re starting to sense that you’re putting your own needs ahead of theirs.
If that’s the case, you know what to do. Jensen’s research shows that practicing thoughtfulness and cooperativeness really does work to defuse your colleagues’ impulse to take you down.
Cooney et al frame the issue as black and white. They write that there’s a basic conflict between our desires to “do what other people have not yet done and to be just like everyone else,” so that if we satisfy our impulse to stand out, we can’t conform any longer, and failure to conform leads to feelings of exclusion.
Jensen’s view suggests a different way of looking at it: Even if your high performance puts you on another plane, separating you from your old bunch, that nonconformity doesn’t have to come with the punishments of rejection or sniping. If you make an effort to be altruistic, the group will reward you. If not with lunch invitations, then at least with acceptance — a kind of benevolence of its own.
via Why Superstars Struggle to Bond with Their Teams – Andrew O’Connell – Harvard Business Review.
Why Superstars Struggle to Bond with Their Teams
