Sometime today, in a windowless conference room at a research university, around a dozen professors will settle around a long laminate table with a printed dossier at every chair and a carafe of coffee. The agenda says they are deciding whether a colleague gets promoted. Somewhere around minute forty, a senior professor will raise his hand and offer the room a piece of social media gossip about the candidate. He has not checked it. Nobody else at the table will check it either. They will trade the grim, pursed-lip nods people exchange when someone confirms the worst thing they suspected about another human being. It will change the outcome.
Multiply that room by every research university on the continent and you get a fair map of how academic careers get decided. Academic politics is, in meaningful part, a continuation of middle school by people who served at the lower rungs of the social hierarchy. I have been a professor for more than twenty years, and I have a story about this kind of meeting. It involves a photograph. The story is waiting further down the page. Before you get there, you need to know how the trick works, who ends up paying for it, and what to do when it is aimed at you.
This is not the first time I have spoken about terrible workplace behavior. Do make sure to read prior articles on Ostracism, Conformity, and Stereotyping.
The pettiness
You might have ignored the recent influx of books on group psychology (by Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel Colin M. Fisher etc.) and still think the smartest workplaces full of people trained to demand evidence would be the last place a rumor would be weighted more heavily than fact-check requests. Researchers tested something close to this on 4,874 university employees across 339 work groups, and found that the employees most likely to be targeted with exclusion and sabotage were the highest performers, and a driving emotion was envy (LINK). The better you do, the bigger the target.
Organizational psychologists call the behavior social undermining, first documented with the most obvious sample you thought of: police officers in Slovenia (LINK). First thing to know, undermining damaged people more than support helped them. Second, the worst outcomes belonged to people whose underminer and supporter were the same person. Think of the Godfather maxim, keep your friends close but your enemies closer. The colleague who toasts your book over an old fashioned at dinner and blasts your character in a closed meeting is worse than any adversary because of the unprepared/unexpected betrayal.
One psychological activator of social undermining is social comparison (the ultimate review is here). Think of the protégé who lands a better job than the mentor ever held. Mixed emotions often bubble within the mentor and one of them is often envy. But this is too imprecise. Recent envy research splits the emotion in two:
benign envy pushed people to climb to higher heights and feats, and made people better
malicious envy pushed people to drag an adjacent climber down
What personality trait is highly linked to malicious envy? The fear of failure (Lange & Crusius, 2015). And this fear infects all types of people and jobs. The infection even spreads to tenured full professors, with one of the most protected jobs in the American economy.
Too political, too aggressive, too self-promotional
If you spent time in a university, you know how sabotage operates. Someone gets dropped from an email chain about work related to their expertise. A search committee develops a sudden deep concern about “fit.” A senior colleague warns a graduate student that a junior faculty member is “too political” or “too aggressive” or “too self-promotional,” precisely selected words because no evidence on earth could falsify them. An external reviewer gets picked for a promotion case precisely because of a known grudge.
The behaviors are small, and they cost careers.
Who pays
Graduate students pay first. They often start their hopeful calling at the tender age of 23 believing in the meritocracy of intellectual life. They watch their advisor freeze out a competitor. They watch an invited speaker get ripped apart by someone in the audience who lost out to them for an internship a few decades ago. Within three years of graduate school they learn the part of the job they are working towards, where science is created, where creative ideas are generated, where beloved hypotheses are falsified, is maybe a third of the job. The rest is managing other people’s wounded ego.
Then there are predictable people who pay….those who are publishing the most, drawing the best students, giving the most talks, earning the largest paychecks, receiving the greatest public accolades, doing the work senior people hoped for.
And the payments are extracted from people who shows signs of non-conformism and thus, unpredictable in terms of their loyalty.
My complaint is narrowly focused on unverified claims, deployed in situations that the target do not discover until later, against which no defense is possible. And before I describe a story, let it be known I have felt the warm surge of schadenfreude when a rival’s grant got rejected. I have murmured agreement at gossip because it flattered my side of a feud. Being a clinical psychologist who studies social relationships and emotions did not install immunity. The difference between me and the man in my story comes down to integrity.
If you are targeted, by one or many, here is what to do, in ascending order of difficulty.
Keep a folder
Document everything. Save the emails. The day a friend leans across a conference dinner and tells you what your chair has been saying about you, type the quote into your phone before dessert arrives, with the date marked. Share your thoughts in a text to close friends, a therapist, someone in HR. A timestamped record is the best thing to defend your reputation.
Make your career shatterproof
The fastest way to defang the people who can hurt you inside one building is to make your standing depend on something bigger than the building. Publish where people outside your discipline read. Build relationships with editors, journalists, practitioners, and the students who graduate and go great things in the world. The narrower your audience, the more leverage the small people hold over you, because they can still drive the rules of the game you are playing. Give yourself a second, third, and fourth game.
Resist politeness
The petty colleague is betting that the thing they claim about you will never reach you and if does, it will not be attached to them. A dozen decent people keeping their mouths shut out of professional courtesy is what lets a rumor run rampant. So disrupt the chain. When word reaches you, call them in. Give them an opportunity to speak of the issue. Sometimes there will be a demeanor change, even a willingness to begin the retraction. If not, bring in a third party who can be privy to the exchange. Your task is to let them know this is unacceptable and the consequences will not be absorbed without a fair fight.
Reminiscing about my workplace in 2013, what I experienced was ludicrous.
The guy said I had been posting pictures of my butt all over the internet.
It was my knee.
Be generous
Do not become him. The high school nerd with tenure was once a graduate student getting humiliated by somebody with more power, and when this happened he probably made himself a vow that one day he would be at the head of the table dishing out hurt. Most senior academics learned their model of behavior from others who undermined them, so the pattern reproduces like a bad accent. When a graduate student outpublishes you, congratulate them in public. When a junior colleague wins the grant you wanted, promote them as a rising star to watch for. When a peer’s book sells more copies than yours did, read it carefully and detail the stories and phrases that impressed you.
There is even a self-interested case, buried in the same study of 4,874 university employees. High performers who felt woven into their work group got targeted far less, because envy is deprived of oxygen when it feels as if your win belongs partly to me. Generosity given freely serves as a healthy psychological defense mechanism.
My cowardice
I would love to tell you I confronted him. That I stormed into his office
(vastly larger than mine) and made him say it to my face. I did not. I sat with the resentment, told a few close friends, and let it metabolize into an anecdote I have not shared until now.
What I should have done is detail a problem that can be easily eradicated from the workplace.
End the double standard used when judging accusations or evidence.
Demand proof from people regardless of whether they confirm or condemn our assumptions.
Use the same standard for information that flatters your beliefs and information that threatens them.
Verify with behavioral evidence before you destroy a reputation.
Part II is coming.
And so is first access to my Well-Being Lab’s new articles on curiosity and purpose in life.
Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.
Read Past Issues Here Including:
Psychological Richness: The Third Path to A Good Life We Crowned Too Fast
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When we were first married, my husband saw an injustice to me and made the comment, “No good deed goes unpunished.” I sat with your article a long time this morning. My first thought was you were not a coward, you were inexperienced with injustice. That inexperience percolated. Now thousands of people have benefited from your openness and honesty about it. Perhaps like me you were raised not to complain, to suck it up. It took yours, but here you are helping other people understand their own humanity and growth path. Guts are like a bonsai tree. They may take a long time to grow, but look at the beauty. And it lasts. Yes sometimes we need to trim away the dead crap. Thanks for helping us do that.
Groups, *shudder*. Everyone wants out of the meeting so not one person stands up and demands, "Show me the ass!" If the meeting were an email (as they all should be), someone would have dropped a link.