Popularity and the office: Just like high school – The Wall Street Journal

DUBLIN — I don't have especially fond memories of high school – I wasn't particularly cool or interesting as a teenager – so I found this article both depressing and cathartic. According to this author, the office is often just like high school, with likeable, popular people snagging most of the awards. And just like high school, that isn't necessarily a good thing. In fact, the qualities that make people popular are not the same as the qualities that make someone a good or effective employee or boss. The result is that when the office rewards people based on their popularity, it often ends up entrenching problematic behaviours and bad decision-making in a way that ultimately hurts the bottom line. While that may be scant consolation to those currently suffering through high school (or to those of us in an office), it is good to know that popular people don't get everything right. – Felicity Duncan.The Problem With Popular Employees.By Marissa King.(The Wall Street Journal) If the workplace sometime seems reminiscent of high school, it's for good reason: The perks and pitfalls of popularity do not end at graduation..___STEADY_PAYWALL___.Forty years after the end of high school, those who were once part of the cool crowd get paid 10% more than their socially excluded peers. These effects persist after taking into account IQ and social background. Even as adults, we tend to confer privileges upon the popular. Within offices, popular adults have better job-performance ratings and higher career success..As a species, we are hard-wired to pay attention to and reward popularity. Our brains literally light up when presented with images of well-liked group members. As early as preschool, children focus more of their attention on popular kids in the classroom. Adults tend to visually fixate on more popular adults. And even monkeys will forgo juice rewards to gaze at pictures of more popular members of their troops. These evolutionary predispositions to direct our effort and attention toward popular peers, however, can be self-defeating. Popularity can have deleterious effects on both team members and on organisations..For starters: Popularity can negatively affect decision-making and lead to suboptimal performance by fuelling overconfidence. One of the reasons that overconfidence is so common is that it makes people more popular. For instance, 242 MBA students were given a list of items ranging from Pygmalion to Windemere Wild (some of which were fictitious) and asked how familiar they were with each item. The students who were most likely to report knowing about the made-up items had the highest status at the end of the semester. This work by Cameron Anderson, a professor at the University of California Berkeley, and his colleagues found that overconfidence leads to higher status because it is falsely mistaken for competence..When overconfidence is discovered to be unjustified and individuals' actual abilities are revealed, groups still don't look any less favourably on their overconfident counterparts. Because overconfidence is socially rewarded and its detection isn't penalized, overconfidence generates further popularity and doesn't require individuals to acknowledge their own limitations..What's more, even when incompetence isn't masked by popularity and overconfidence, people prefer to work with lovable fools rather than competent jerks. While perhaps understandable, this means that the talent of less socially adept employees is underutilised as workers seek the more appealing collaborator..Many of the downsides of popularity for individuals arise from a specific type of popularity – status. Status is a person's visibility, influence and power. It is often achieved through aggression. However, according to Mitch Prinstein, a professor at the University of North Carolina and author of the book "Popular," there are two kinds of popularity. The second form of popularity – likability – is far less damaging than status..People who are likable, unlike those pursuing status, tend to listen to others, engage in behaviours that help out the group, and don't dominate interactions. Likable people are also more resilient, fulfilled and happier..The problem is that it is rare to find people who are both high-status and likable. Only 30% of people who are high in status are also really likable. According to Prinstein, many people mistakenly pursue and reward the wrong type of popularity because they tend to be myopically focused on status..While we are wired to be attentive to popularity and seek out social acceptance, we have a choice about what type of popularity we pursue and organisations reward. When faced with aggressive versus likeable types of popularity, for example, rewarding and promoting the likeable candidate is the better choice for the organisation..Another way leaders can alleviate this problem is to link at least part of individuals' rewards to the performance of their collaborators when work is interdependent, according to recent research by Peter Belmi at the University of Virginia and Jeff Pfeffer at Stanford University. In a series of experiments involving more than 900 participants, Belmi and Pfeffer found that when individuals were solely rewarded for their own performance, they choose to work with people who were socially desirable – even if they weren't competent. However, when their compensation was at least partially connected to the performance of another person, they valued competence more..In high school, one didn't need good grades to be popular. But in the workplace, our competence, collaborativeness, effectiveness and hard work should amount to more..– Marissa King is professor of organisational behaviour at the Yale School of Management.

Popularity and the office: Just like high school – The Wall Street Journal

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