Stereotype Threat & Employee Performance
This article could just as well be titled How Stereotyping & Categorisation of your Employees Can Send you Broker. The topic is about human behaviour but it is also about running and maintaining a successful business focused on achieving workforce potential.
This morning I have been sitting in the sun casually reading What the Dog Saw: and other stories by Malcolm Gladwell and the article which I have only just finished was The Art of Failure: why some people choke and others panic (pages 263-279) published in the New Yorker in August, 2000. Malcolm’s meticulous treatment of the contextual differences between choking versus an experience of panic was interesting, but the article’s mention of the term “Stereotype Threat” caught my eye.
While all theories have a certain amount of conflicting feedback, I’d like to focus on what Stereotype Threat means to the average employer. Studies have shown that subjects confronted with a stereotype – such as black men doing academic tests and white men trying to jump – are negatively affected in their performance. The theory is quite straight-forward in that when we find ourselves in situations where the expectation is that we cannot achieve because of a stereotype then we will probably do a damn strong attempt at proving the stereotype limitation through our limited performance. Its not that white men can’t jump… its that white men can’t jump when they are stereotyped as not being able to jump and confronted with a large black man with a tape measure to assess that expectation. Which is why black men in the United States do so badly on their SAT. Stereotype Threat.
How does this affect you? Simple. Hopefully obviously simple. Every time you reinforce, even jokingly, stereotypes for any categorisation in your workforce you are courting the limitations that accompany them. While it might be cute to separate the women from the men in your banter, or whites from asians for that matter, you have to take responsibility for the stereotypes that accompany such terms. Clearly you want all stereotypes to stay at your business doorway and you need to be vigilant about their introduction at work.
Stereotype Threat has a passing similarity to the in-group and out-group paradigm where the boss treats people according to their in-group/out-group status. Again its a categorisation. Research has shown that managers tend to attribute in-group members more positively than out-group members. If an in-group member gets a success or a big sale then it was their hard work. If an out-group member has the same success then it was simply circumstance, not the person’s ability. Again, when there is a lack of success the in-group member is attributed to having a bad circumstance to work with while the out-group member gets tumbled for their lack of ability and skill.
My point is that in-group members and out-group members are just more categorisations. They’re very similar to stereotypes – man-made constructs of the way we attribute and employ our expectations onto others based on pre-determined criteria and to rationalise our own unique biases. What The Art of Failure brought up with Stereotype Threat is critical to your business outcomes… I dare you to challenge yourself for the next four weeks to take every single person in your employment at face value on their merits alone. If you catch yourself stereotyping or categorising in-group/out-group membership then give 10 dollars to the Haiti fund (or something).
Because what could be worse than head-hunting the best recruits for top dollar then shooting your own productivity and creative potential in the foot by allowing stereotypes into the office? You might not be able to completely eliminate the problem but you can at least improve on it through awareness.
February 3rd, 2010 at 9:32 am
Another in-group/out-group thing worth thinking about is the way managers perceive information that comes from the in-group versus the out-group. Because they actually pay closer attention to what the in-group say to them there is a strong correlation between in-group information entering the managers office, manager’s memory of the actual conversation and the manager’s likelihood of acting on the information.
We listen more closely to people “like us” or whom “we like” as opposed to people “not like us” or whom “we do not like”.
In-group/out-group dynamics have a potential impact on your business bottom line.