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Are Your Top Performers Picked On?

Sebastian Bailey, Contributor

New research suggests that top performers often feel hidden abuse.  If you’re trying to attract or retain great people, whether in a start-up or established business, this is troubling.

A study in a US financial services company asked supervisors to rate their employees’ performance. Meanwhile employees reported how often they’d been a target of various types of victimization over the last 30 days. The results revealed that when there were big differences between team members’ performance scores, those at either end of the performance spectrum were more likely to be victimized. Low performers were more likely to experience overt forms of victimization like aggression, swearing and hostility, while high performers were more likely to report covert victimization like sabotage, withholding information or the silent treatment. This wasn’t the case in teams without such marked performance differences.

Jaclyn Jensen, a professor at DePaul University,  reasoned that teams have norms about expected levels of performance – if individuals violate these norms, they are punished. Low performers are seen as free-riders and might jeopardize the team’s overall success, so become the target of overt bullying. Supervisors, also frustrated with these individuals’ performance, turn a blind eye. And although star performers contribute more to the team’s success, they also trigger ‘tall Poppy syndrome’, making their mediocre peers more aware of their own shortcomings. They’re seen as a threat, so must be brought down. But because of top performers’ high prestige, perpetrators opt for covert victimization which is less likely to be detected and easier to shrug off.

Researchers also found that overt victimization lead to poorer performance, indicating a downward spiral: low performers are picked on so their performance becomes even worse. Covert victimization wasn’t associated with a drop in performance, although the victims of covert behavior tended to be high performers anyway. It’s easy to imagine high performers downplaying or camouflaging their achievements in an attempt to stop themselves becoming a target. So whilst high perfomers’ results weren’t affected, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine that they’d want to be part of a different, higher-performing team.  This may be one of the reasons why high performers’ intent to stay with an organization is often reported to be lower than their less effective peers.

The solution clearly isn’t to encourage mediocrity. We need to differentiate between high and low performers, but such differentiation makes concerns about free-riding and feelings of envy stronger. The answer lies in constructive conversations about performance which focus on individual strengths and weaknesses, rather than encouraging social comparisons.

Leaders need to be honest about the culture they set around high performance. What ‘norms’ of performance do they encourage? Do they tend to give high performers a low profile? By setting an expectation of ‘exceptional’ performance, leaders can build a culture where everyone is supported to reach the peak of their potential, rather than shot down when they get there.