New Study: Rudeness Reduces Task Performance and Helpfulness

A recent post on the BusinessWeek blog IQ Matters, asks “Why All The Focus On Jerks?” It is a good question, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, as I am working on a little essay on exactly that question. Before I get to this cool new rudeness study, let’s consider one reason for the interest in jerks, bullies, and all those terms used to describe these creeps and their workplaces.

Jena McGregor, who wrote the post, points to a couple of new scholarly studies – one of abusive supervisors and the other of rudeness --  in the October Academy of Management Journal as one indication of the rising interest in jerks.  McGregor also mentions other signs of interest like SucceesFactors “no assholes policy,” Jim Kilts discussion of “the no jerk rule” in his new book, as well as the attention directed at The No Asshole Rule.

I would argue that academic studies aren’t just a sign of interest in the problem, I would add that –- despite all the whining and hand wringing these days that business research doesn’t matter much (see this report) --  the interest in jerks, abusive supervisors, bullying, mobbing, or as I call them, assholes, has risen in part because there is a growing – - and increasingly more rigorous – body of academic research that shows how nasty people and nasty behavior damages people and undermines organizational performance. This research has been widely reported in the press, and leaders of organizations –- including in corporations, government, non-profits, and labor unions –- are being influenced by such research, and I would argue, ought to be influenced by such research.

To this point, consider one of the new studies in the October 2007 Academy of Management Journal, which considers the question “Does Rudeness Really Matter?” Christine Porath and Amir Erez conducted a series of controlled experiments to examine the effects of rudeness on how well people perform on routine and creative tasks, as well as how likely they are to help others. Porath and Erez used different interventions to make their experimental subjects feel as if they had been victims of rudeness – having the experimenter berate them for being late, having a an apparent stranger  berating students would couldn’t the find the right room (“Can’t you read? … I am not a secretary here, I am a busy professor”), and in the final experiment, just thinking of a time when they were victims of rudeness.  In other words, these are studies of two incidents where people were abused by temporary assholes, and one incident where they were asked to dredge-up memories of a past encounter with an asshole.

Experiments are sometimes questioned as they measure seemingly trivial behaviors – in this case performance meant completing anagrams and imaging different uses for a brick; helpfulness meant whether or not participants helped the experimenter after he or she “accidentally” dropped ten pencils or books.   The advantage of experiments, however, is that they allow a level of control that is impossible in “real” settings – people are randomly assigned to different conditions and everyone in the same condition is subjected to pretty much the same thing.  As a result,  it is much easier to untangle WHY people respond differently under different conditions. So, for example, in addition to the effects on performance demonstrated across the three different experiments, I was struck by the effects on helpfulness. In experiment 2 (where the rude professor berated  the “lost” student, saying “Can’t you read?”), a few minutes later when the experimenter (who apparently had no connection to the rude professor) “accidentally” dropped a pile of books, only 24% of the insulted students helped pick up the books, but 73% of those who weren’t insulted volunteered to lend a hand.

As always, more research is needed. But I find this study compelling and, certainly, it suggests that  little bits of nastiness can have a big cumulative impact. And when you combine this study with findings from a host of field studies by researchers including Bennett Tepper, Pamela Lutgen-Sandvik, Christine Pearson, Loraleigh Keashly, and many others, you can see that the human and business case against  assholes keeps growing. And despite all howls that business research doesn’t matter much, this research keeps bolstering the message that breeding and putting up with these creeps just plain costs too much. This message is seeping into business culture throughout the world (Europe is well ahead of the U.S.), the list of organizations that take this problem seriously is growing, and the lawyers are starting to line-up to make sure that, when organizations allow such abuse to persist, it will start costing them serious money.

Plus, putting the lost costs, lost productivity,  and lost creativity aside,  this emerging social movement means that when leaders are suspected of running an asshole infested workplace, they run a risk of being deluged with unpleasant questions from the press, job candidates, clients, shareholders and so on that they would rather not have to answer.

Comments

[Fred]

Seen a rude asshole? Time for sendahole.com.

[Jan]

The Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) have made studies on the effectiveness of combat crews in AFV's (Armoured Fighting Vehicles). What they found was that one character quality degraded the effectiveness of the whole crew more than anything: If a person was sloppy. If the rest of the crew held a certain standard, but one of the crew member didn't care, disregarded safety and didn't share the other persons values, the total effectiveness of the crew suffered. I think this is important for projects and business environments in general.

[Steve]

I don't disagree that this is a real, measurable problem. But other real, measurable problems have been studied ad nauseum (chronic late and over budget software projects, e.g.) and yet they still persist. Why? Because the conditions that drive these practices persist-- and even get worse. I'd argue that the conditions that foster asshole behavior will also persist (and likely get worse) so merely drawing attention to it, even through meaningful research studies, won't result in a reduction.