When Looking Like a Good Employee Is Mistaken for Being One

Source: Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels You know that colleague. They catch the management's eye and enthusiastically support leadership's priorities. They may be highly visible when senior people are present and have a knack for making ordinary work sound like an exceptional accomplishment. Meanwhile, others may be producing excellent work without fanfare. How Does Self-Monitoring Influence Workplace Behavior? Social psychologists call the psychological difference underlying these patterns self-monitoring: individual differences in how closely people observe social cues and regulate their behavior and self-presentation in response. High self-monitors are social adapters, even chameleons. They look outward to determine what a situation requires and can alter their behavior for different audiences. Low self-monitors are more likely to behave consistently across situations, guided by their internal attitudes and dispositions. In workplaces, high self-monitoring can translate into emphasizing one's competence, signaling dedication, agreeing with a supervisor, offering compliments, or strategically making visible contributions. Such behavior may accompany good performance, but it can also affect judgments independently of performance. That creates a measurement problem: Do high self-monitors perform better, or are they better at persuading others that they perform better? Performance or Appearance of Performance? A new meta-analysis by Klaus Moser and colleagues examined 33 studies, covering 35 samples and 5,912 employees, to explore whether self-monitoring supports objectively measured performance, or only the impression others have of the performance. Unlike some earlier reviews, the researchers excluded career-success measures such as promotions. Promotion is not performance. It can reflect performance, and also organizational politics, ambition, and connections. Across the studies, self-monitoring had only a small relationship with measures of job performance. More importantly, the relationship depended on how performance was measured. Self-monitoring was modestly associated with supervisors' ratings. It was essentially unrelated to the more objectively measured performance outcomes such as sales or other countable results. The more discretion evaluators had, the more powerful the impact of self-presentation. When performance evaluation relied on observable outcomes, the apparent advantage of self-monitoring disappeared. The researchers also considered whether self-monitoring might reflect genuine competency in socially demanding jobs. Perhaps the ability to read and adapt to others produces better results in leadership, sales, negotiation, or other boundary-spanning roles. The evidence did not support that explanation. Self-monitoring was not more strongly related to performance among supervisors or people in boundary-spanning positions. Across studies and statistical analyses, the findings fit the impression-formation explanation (what researchers called a biased-perceiver perspective) better than the higher competence explanation. These findings do not indicate that socially polished employees are incompetent or manipulative. Statistical findings should never be used to infer individuals' character. Nor does it mean that numerical measurements of outcomes are always better than human judgment. Performance "numbers" can be distorted by territory (for example, salespeople), resources, opportunity, or even luck. Ratings, done with caution, can capture important contributions that numbers miss. The studies also varied considerably, and measured variables could not explain much of that variation. Few studies used strong longitudinal designs, and available outcome measures focused on task performance. Self-monitoring may contribute to interpersonal adaptability or social capital in ways the existing research has not adequately measured. Still, the findings expose an important vulnerability in performance management. Whenever standards are vague, evidence is limited, and supervisors have substantial interpretive freedom, employees are evaluated partly on their ability to create a convincing performance of performance. Organizations need human judgment, but most provide structural support for fairness and objectivity. Clear standards, multiple sources of evidence, direct observation, and careful separation of task results from social visibility can reduce the risk. Evaluators should also ask a simple question: What did this employee demonstrably contribute, and how do I know? Reducing Bias in Performance Reviews Moser and colleagues' advice for addressing bias created by self-monitoring behavior—to use "self-disciplining aids for raters when observing, interpreting and evaluating"—aligns with solutions for other types of bias. The bias interrupter methodology developed by law professor and author Joan Williams to address gender bias in supervisory evaluations suggests that companies structure performance reviews so managers must provide objective, evidence-based written explanations for ratings. Writing down specific performance-related examples prevents "gut-feeling" bias from dictating an employee's career trajectory. My book—The Canary Code: A Guide to Neurodiversity, Dignity, and Intersectional Belonging at Work—stresses the importance of objectivity and a focus on outcomes, and that work is fair for people of all neurotypes. As Moser and colleagues' meta-analysis demonstrates, without a disciplined approach to performance evaluation, organizations are likely to keep promoting people who perform competence most effectively rather than those who perform the job most effectively. Creating systems that support fairness and control for bias in evaluation is just good management.