The Compassionate Instinct

Pay is an especially vivid sign of power differences, and many studies suggest that when the difference between the highest-and lowest-paid people in a company or team is reduced, a host of good things happen, including improved financial performance, better product quality, enhanced research productivity, and, for baseball teams, a better won-lost record.

In the United States and other Western countries, we are always pressing to create bigger differences between winners and losers. To be sure, some people are more important to an organization than others because they are more difficult to replace or have more essential skills. Status differences will always be with us. But Frank Blake and other like-minded leaders build organizations with fewer assholes and spark better performance by embracing what I call the “power-performance paradox.” They realize that their company has and should have a pecking order, but they do everything they can to downplay and reduce status and power differences among members.

Another step you can take to avoid becoming an asshole is to get some friends and colleagues who will tell you when you are acting like one. Better yet, hold others responsible for telling you when you’re being an asshole—make it safe for them to do so. And when they tell you, listen to them. Remember, power will blind you to all the ways you are acting like a jerk and hurting other people. If people tell you that you’re acting like an asshole and your reaction is that they’re wrong, odds are that you’re fooling yourself.

I’ve learned that competition breeds assholes, so it’s essential to try not to foster an overly competitive workplace. Many organizations constantly rate and rank people, giving the spoils to a few stars and treating the rest as second-and third-class citizens. The unfortunate result is that people who ought to be friends become enemies—ruthless jerks who run wild as they scramble to push themselves up the ladder and push their rivals down. They act on the dangerous and widespread assumption that professional life requires cutthroat competition. In truth, it is nearly always a blend of cooperation and competition, and organizations that forbid extreme internal competition not only are more civilized but perform better as well, despite societal myths to the contrary.

Research on “framing” by social psychologists suggests a few tricks you can use to avoid being overly competitive. The assumptions and language we use—the lenses through which we see the world—can have big effects on how we treat others. Even seemingly small differences in language that we hear and use can determine whether we cooperate or compete. Stanford researcher Lee Ross and his colleagues have run experiments in which they had pairs of students play a game. If the students cooperated, they’d share a reward equally, but if they competed, one player would take the lion’s share of the goodies.

Ross and his colleagues told some players that the game was called the “Community Game” (conjuring up images of shared fate and collaboration); they told others they’d be playing the “Wall Street Game” (conjuring up images of a dog-eat-dog world). People who played the Community Game were dramatically more cooperative and honest about their intentions than those who believed they were playing the Wall Street Game. These findings were later replicated with U.S. Air Force Academy cadets. Related experiments show that when people are first exposed to words like enemy, battle, inconsiderate, vicious, lawyer, and capitalist, they are far less likely to cooperate than when first exposed to words like helped, fair, warm, mutual, and share.

The implication is that if you want to quell your inner jerk, use ideas and language that frame life in ways that will make you focus on cooperation. For instance, make a conscious effort to use the word we rather than I and me. Tape-record and listen to yourself and colleagues at a couple of meetings; if they are nearly all about “me, myself, and I” and “us versus them,” it might be time to start changing the way you talk.

Taken together, these steps can help you enforce a No Asshole rule. If you manage your organization so that you address the disturbing influences of power and manage yourself to avoid catching and spreading asshole poisoning, you can fuel a virtuous cycle and help sustain a civilized workplace.

A FEELING FOR FICTION

Keith Oatley

“YOU BE THAT ONE,” I remember my daughter saying to a companion. “And I’ll be this one.” My daughter was about 5 at the time, and, as in the imaginary games played by children of that age, she and her friend were arranging roles. But they weren’t about to play a game. They were preparing to watch a movie.