Hogan, in its approach to personality assessment, focuses on ‘reputation’ i.e., how others perceive you, as a more important determinant of job performance than ‘identity’ i.e., who you think you are. Inherently, this approach involves viewing the individual not as an isolated entity, but as a part of a larger ecosystem – one that this individual interacts with, influences, and is influenced by. I see the corporate workplace as one such ecosystem, within which its employees are inextricably intertwined.
While we are generally aware of the influence that the people around have on us, what intrigues me is how exactly the presence of others can alter our different behaviours, including our performance on certain tasks. Therefore, keeping in line with my previous exploration into the psychology of leadership, this article aims to give an overview of some social psychological phenomena which exemplify that individuals often perform differently when others are around.
Social Facilitation
The first possible effect of the presence of others is social facilitation i.e. when being around others improves one’s performance. Studies by American social psychologist Robert Zajonc and his colleagues (1969) pioneered the understanding of this phenomenon, by showing that cockroaches performed better on a simple light – escaping task when being watched by other cockroaches than when not. Since then, several studies involving human subjects have also corroborated these findings.
The caveat however, is that these conclusions seem to hold only in case of simple tasks that are already well – learned. In case of difficult tasks, the presence of others does not seem to improve performance, with studies also finding an opposite effect i.e., people and animals performing worse when around others.
The phenomenon underlying social facilitation has been found to be arousal i.e., increased energy and alertness in our bodies owing, among other things, to our awareness that people are evaluating/judging us and our performance. What follows is an increased ability to perform ‘dominant responses’ (well – learned tasks), and feeling flustered when working on more complex tasks, leading to poorer performance.
Social Loafing
An alternative scenario, wherein social facilitation does not seem to operate, is when one’s individual performance cannot be evaluated as separate from the others. This is typically the case of group projects, team assignments – where others aren’t just present, but are working together with the individual. This absence of evaluation has the opposite effect, where instead of feeling aroused, one tends to feel relaxed, and less alert.
Just like arousal, such relaxation also operates differently based on task difficulty and familiarity. When people are in the presence of others and their individual performance is not being judged, they tend to perform worse on simple tasks, especially those they don’t care too much about. Inversely, relaxation seems to enable the kind of focus required to tackle complex tasks, as indicated by improved performance. This set of tendencies, which has been corroborated by several studies, was termed social loafing by social psychologists Bibb Latané, Kipling Williams, and Stephen Harkins in 2006. Interestingly, a comprehensive research review in 1993 also found that this tendency is stronger in men than in women, possibly owing to differences in their approach to personal relationships.
Evidently, our performance on tasks, whether simple or complex, is not independent of the social setup we operate in. Findings such as those discussed above can have important implications in organizational settings that often centre around task performance and teamwork. In context of organizational capability – a key aspect of Threefish’s work – these insights may also have a role to play in decisions regarding day – to – day work allocation, performance evaluation metrics, team building, and so on.
References:
Aronson, E., Wilson, T. D., & Sommers, S. R. (2021). Social Psychology Global Edition (10th ed.). Pearson Education Limited.
Hogan Assessments. (2021, January 29). What is Personality? Identity Versus Reputation. Hogan. https://www.hoganassessments.com/blog/what-is-personality-identity-reputation/
