Are Positive Employees Really Better Employees?
Pamela Grundy, Senior Editor | Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 8:25AM As anyone who has ever navigated the corporate workplace knows, relentless positivity is essential to success in today’s corporate world. Negativity has become a sin worse than theft, lying, or being a bit too fat or too old. Negative workers are quickly and severely reprimanded. If they keep kvetching, they will generally be fired.
‘Negativity’ is a broad term however. In today’s workplace ‘negativity’ can refer to anything from critical thinking of any kind to not smiling enough (what is enough?) to asking too many (or any) pertinent questions about what looks like a serious impending problem. I personally knew one CSR who was reprimanded for popping a balloon as a ‘joke’, not because of the noise it made, but because it could have been construed by other employees as a ‘negative’ form of humor.
Do constantly grinning, chirpy employees really do a better job than surly ones?
In Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Barbara Ehrenreich says no. Ehrenreich credits the cult of positive thinking with nearly crashing the world economy in August of 2008, pointing to example after example of specific highly-placed employees who sounded the alarm about the impending crash and were subsequently fired for ‘negativity.’
A recent study published in the November/December 2009 edition of the Australasian Science journal found that negative employees “…are less prone to judgmental errors, are more resistant to eyewitness distortions and are better at producing high-quality, effective persuasive messages,” than are employees who maintain an unchanging smiling facade and look only for the best in every situation.
Ehrenreich describes how, during the 1990s, the cult of positive thinking became untethered from any connection to reality or functionality within the corporate world. Corporate America, giddy with the waves of easy cash produced by rapid financial deregulation, openly embraced a chaos-theory model of CEO performance. This new model claimed that success was not tied to an understanding of the specific business itself, but rather to an intangible attitude that drew wealth to the particular CEO.
The idea was that success lay more in the unique worth of individual personalities (positive ones!) than in performance and business expertise. CEOs from some of the largest corporations in the world began to regularly attend sweat lodges and Law of Attraction workshops, all the while rigidly enforcing a ban on negative feedback from underlings. CEOs were hired without regard to any real understanding of the corporation they were about to run, but rather on their fame and image and strength of intangible mojo.
The money kept rolling in, so it was easy to justify this behavior. Clearly, irrational idiocacy was much more effective than genuine business acumen. In actuality, the temporary flood of money bore no relationship whatsoever to CEO attendance at New Age Workshops or any given CEOs mojo quotient, but was rather a temporary effect of a classic financial bubble as it inflated regardless of what anyone did or didn’t do.
Today, enforced positive thinking serves other purposes within corporate organizations. Though enforced positivity can easily be shown to have quantifiable negative effects on productivity and profitability, requiring unquestioning chirpiness in all employees does create a compliant, easily-controlled workforce. It helps to keep the money at the top, and to insulate executives from the consequences of their actions, all the while making corporate policy more and more delusional and surreal.
Ehrenreich’s antidote to relentless positivity is NOT relentless negativity, but rather, realism. Realism makes for grounded business models and sane commerce, but it doesn’t appeal to the less than one half of one percent of persons in America who are currently hogging all the money. They understandably see nothing in it for them.
So stop smiling. Do ask questions. Do get angry. Do channel that anger productively.
And do stay tuned for upcoming personal examples of corporate dysfunction in action, as well as lots of ideas about what to do about it and what can happen next if we decide to care.
Reader Comments (5)
Hah! Excellent post. This makes so much sense. It's a side I've thought of but never materialized. Great video, "must have been sending tsunami vibes", well isn't that one to ponder, pahlease. I think that there is so much truth in here and you know, so many people keep their mouths shut and go along with things, smiles and all, and then the next thing you know, they explode or have major health issues, from keeping it all inside because deep down (or not so deep down) they see the wrongs and can't do anything about it. So it sort of becomes a moral and ethical issue.
This is so being pushed at my workplace. Morale is very low and they expect people to be happy and smiling all the time. And to avoid those who gossip, avoid those who are negative. If you did all they expect no one would talk to anyone.
The one person I know who's *genuinely* positive can only be that way 95% of the time. The other 5%, she'll have a good reason to not be AND SAYS SO. This is healthy. It's reality.
But in Perpetual Happy Face Corporate America, if you're the first to notice the building's on fire, the correct reaction (with a smile) is "Oh, what a lovely opportunity for a marshmallow roast", instead of the "negative" (but accurate) "The building's on fire!". No wonder this country is such a mess these days!
I've always appreciated the way you take everything around you, think about it, and create a cogent, intelligent (and therefore, in my book, positive) response.
Yes. I've experienced this and loathed it since high school, which is where I think they hope to instill it. Aren't cheerleaders always popular and happy, after all? Wasn't our school system set up initially to train factory workers? Perhaps I'd even go so far as to say this comes down to cases of group think and group force. I might call it 'idiot force.' lol And I believe this is what David Foster Wallace was writing about in his "A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again," essay.
I read elsewhere that corporate America had embraced a game theory model...which dovetails nicely with the chaos theory model, actually. It predicates that CEO's are figurehead lottery winners, and that seeing their shining examples is supposed to make the little underlings inspired (that power of positive thinking) to work harder, because one day...one day, they could be just like Mr. Big. Since yeah, this model has no bearing on reality, as the game is a shell game, questioners are deemed negative. It's a process which you see played out over and over and really is enough to make you want to throw up....or write something....or fight back.
As with many things, the problem described here has more to do with the implementation than the underlying idea. Anytime something turns into fundamentalism - even positive fundamentalism - it turns into a rigid code that can't flow with the reality of any given situation.
I want to love the idea of turning to realism as the ideal path. I really do. But I think it's a slippery slope at best. I'm not a big fan of mindless positivity, but far too often I see "realism" serving as a nothing more than a facade for negativity and pessimism.
So a happy medium would be ideal, but I don't believe for a minute that "realism" is it. Maybe a qualifier would help prevent it from sliding down that slippery slope of pessimism. "Positive realism," anyone?