The Price of Pettiness: Bad Behavior in the Workplace and How to Stomp It Out

by PhD Alonso

Overview

Beyond the usual everyday annoyances and exasperations we all experience in the workplace, pettiness limits careers and opportunities on a broad scale and sometimes crosses the line into criminal behavior.

Based on recent research conducted by SHRM, this groundbreaking book examines the seemingly limitless depths of workplace pettiness - as well as the remarkable heights of creativity it seems to inspire in people - and delivers proven tools for anyone to spot pettiness and deal with it directly. In addition to revealing the root cause of pettiness and what can be done to eliminate it, Dr. Alonso also offers insights into the personal and organizational costs associated with petty behavior and shows how HR can be its most fierce adversary. But perhaps best of all, he shares some of the most incredible true stories about petty behavior in the workplace you'll ever read!

Filled with unforgettable examples, this is essential reading for anyone ready to build a healthier, more productive workplace.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781586446222
Publisher:	Society For Human Resource Management
Publication date:	06/14/2019
Sold by:	INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Alexander Alonso, PhD, SHRM-SCP is the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM’s) Chief Knowledge Officer leading operations for SHRM’s Certified Professional and Senior Certified Professional certifications, research functions, and the SHRM Knowledge Advisor service. He is responsible for all research activities, including the development of the SHRM Competency Model and SHRM credentials.
Alexander Alonso, PhD, SHRM-SCP, is SHRM's chief knowledge officer leading intelligence, insights, and innovation functions, as well as SHRM's latest acquisitions, the CEO Academy and Linkage. As leader of SHRM's Research&Insights business units, his total career portfolio has been based upon practical thought leadership designed to make better workplaces and to grow revenue across industry. Alonso's thought leadership has been recognized through various bodies and his research has been featured in numerous media outlets, including USA Today, NBC News, BBC, and CNN.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Studying Pettiness Scientifically

First, let's define our terms. For purposes of this book, our working definitions are:

• Pettiness (noun): Caring about or reacting disproportionately to trivial or inconsequential (i.e., petty) matters.

• Petty (adjective): "Characterized by undue concern with trivial matters, especially of a small-minded or spiteful nature" (Oxford Living eDictionary).

These words date back to the 14th century and derive from petit, which means "small" or "minor" in Middle English/Old French. Numerous contemporary English-language dictionaries and thesauruses define the terms in similar but subtly different ways. These differences embody the nuances in petty behavior, further demonstrating the universality of pettiness as a phenomenon:

• Pettiness: "the quality of complaining or getting angry about things that are not important" (Cambridge); "narrowness of mind or ideas or views; lack of generosity in trifling matters" (American Heritage); "contemptible unimportance" (Roget's Thesaurus).

• Petty: "having or showing narrow ideas [or] interests; mean or ungenerous in small or trifling things; of secondary rank, especially in relation to others of the same class or kind" (Dictionary.com); "minor; subordinate; having little or no importance or significance; marked by or reflective of narrow interests and sympathies" (Merriam-Webster); "showing an excessive concern with unimportant matters or minor details, especially in a narrow-minded way" (American Heritage).

We might regard two 14th-century farmers squabbling over the rights to a pig's lineage as petty (or petit), but back then the matter was probably incredibly important to them. Perspectives count — the personal as well as the etymological.

Today, we understand pettiness as a construct based on 20th-century theories of motivation and personality. Strap yourself in, because this chapter explores a number of psychological and psychoanalytical concepts essential for understanding petty behaviors. These include: neuroticism; emotional stability; stress and stressors; ability; motivation; valence; instrumentality; expectancy; outcomes; primal needs; social learning; self-image; conditional reasoning, affect; competencies; intelligence; personality traits and sub-traits; control; human behavior as quantifiable and predictable using replicable measurements; and a few more.

Using this background as a roadmap, we will arrive at our destination: a new theory of pettiness. Its four-quadrant model measures two key factors noted in the Introduction: the intensity of petty behavior, and the severity of outcomes associated with petty behavior. We'll see how these four categories of pettiness — trivial, minor, major and significant — play out in real life, using actual examples from the workplace courtesy of your long-suffering peers.

Predicting Human Behavior

Pettiness is an aspect of neuroticism, a concept that dates back to Freud and Jung, who were active from the early 1900s through the 1960s, and their successors in the field. Neuroticism is generally defined as emotional instability, especially in the form of behavioral responses to stressful situations. Several questions remain unaddressed by this definition: How much of a role do stressors play in manipulating personality? How are personality traits manifested in those responses? How does pettiness manifest itself in personality? To understand more, let's take a look at how personality is conceptualized in the realm of psychology.

Psychologists have long identified two types of predictors associated with human behavior: ability and motivation. Ability predicts behavior so naturally that it is often expressed as a binary: one who has an ability to engage in a behavior is likely to be motivated to engage in it; one who lacks such an ability is unlikely to be so motivated and is unlikely to engage that behavior. Motivation, however, is not so simple. The motives behind human behaviors vary as much as the theories of motivation that researchers have spent the better part of a century attempting to develop and codify.

A chief example from the early days of theorizing on motivation is Expectancy Theory, which tries to codify why people behave in certain ways. Under Expectancy Theory, three variables determine motivation: (1) valence, or the value one places on desired outcomes; (2) instrumentality, or the degree to which one's specific behaviors will lead to those outcomes; and (3) expectancy, or the likelihood of achieving those outcomes if one tries to do so (by engaging in those behaviors). The problem with Expectancy Theory is that it fails to predict how people arrive at their value judgments for each variable. What factors play a role in one's determinations of value for valence, instrumentality or expectancy?

This failure led, for a while, to the resurgence of older theories of motivation. Needs Theory, for example, states that one's primal needs for safety, belonging, esteem and self-actualization — the climb toward achieving one's best view of oneself — explain one's behaviors. This theory regards basic needs as predictors of people's voluntary choices to act in certain ways, but it does little to explain why people behave in predictable ways toward others or how they make decisions about matters unrelated to their core needs.

Measuring Predictors of Behavior

Over the decades, researchers turned their attention from the theoretical to the applied perspective, attempting to use measurements to triangulate behavior prediction. By focusing on things that could be measured easily, they could treat motivation the way they treated ability. The first researcher to use the measurement approach at scale, Bandura, applied an edict of psychological research —"if you can measure it, you can predict it"— to Social Learning Theory.

Social Learning Theory explains how people are motivated to learn based on their self-image. Bandura started measuring self-esteem, self-efficacy and locus of control — states of mind — to predict behavior. His work turned prediction on its head; researchers realized they could look at things without worrying too much about how those things were defined conceptually. It became easier for researchers to examine other perspectives and concepts related to motivation.

Psychological researchers soon looked at conditional reasoning, affect and competencies as ways to predict human behavior. They took another look at ability, which had been considered the best predictor, breaking it into many different little pieces, or intelligences. They considered what the second-best predictor might be — personality traits? Or states of mind? In order to make human behavior known and quantifiable, the psychology profession was carving it apart.

Personality Traits

One group of researchers successfully made the claim that personality traits play a vital role in predicting behaviors. They conducted a meta-analysis (i.e., they aggregated the findings of all studies on the topic, correcting for artifacts that limited generalizability), and found a set of themes across disciplines — five immutable personality traits. The five traits could be defined easily, measured consistently, and utilized to predict human behaviors accurately. The resulting model, depicted in Figure 1.1, forever altered the way psychologists and other scientists conduct research into human behavior.

Over the subsequent 25 years, legions of researchers have explored the Big Five personality traits, disentangling each super-trait into smaller components. The Conscientiousness trait, for instance, consists of 16 constructs or sub-traits, ranging from dependability to boldness to remorse. The Neuroticism trait, however, has only two primary subtraits: (1) general stability in the face of stressors; and (2) pettiness, defined most recently as the tendency to get agitated over trivial matters.

Which brings us back to the subject of this book.

Seven hundred years after petty entered the vernacular, people are still "sweating the small stuff." More evidence and increasingly refined conceptualizations in the professional literature prove that pettiness is a defining personality trait, which can predict human behaviors (such as social deviance and patriotism) as well as states of mind (such as depression and life satisfaction).

Now there's even a replicable way to measure pettiness consistently: a five-item scale has been developed to help identify the stressors most heavily correlated to pettiness. That gives me hope. Understanding these stressors — the antecedents to pettiness — can lead to a new way of understanding pettiness itself.

A New Theory of Pettiness

The body of research on pettiness provides us with an opportunity to redefine it. We can start thinking of pettiness as a potentially changeable state, rather than solely as an immutable trait. This will enable us to do more than identify petty people: we can change people's petty ways.

The established components of pettiness as a trait and a state are fairly important. But we have a moral imperative to describe pettiness in new ways that enable people to see it and stop it, thereby restoring civility.

Accordingly, I propose a new theory of pettiness as a behavioral motive, based on theories of expectancy plus an examination of the following two behavioral conditions or factors:

1. Intensity of the petty behavior. Acts of pettiness occur on a spectrum; they're not all the same. Yelling at someone for accidentally stepping on your toe, for instance, is petty, but not as intensely petty as seeking to destroy someone for mispronouncing your name at a company event. It's a matter of comparison.

2. Severity of the outcomes associated with the petty behavior. The results of one's acts of pettiness also run the gamut. To someone aggrieved by a co-worker's failure to share a bar tab, for example, it may seem like a good idea at the time to publicize the co-worker's cheapness on the company blog in the guise of a post about corporate culture. It's no longer a good idea when the co-worker files a harassment claim, alleging a hostile work environment because of that post and subsequent publicity, which eventually causes the blogger to be fired. The blogger did not account for what I call "inverse pettiness instrumentality" — a tool for assessing how instrumental the petty behavior will be in achieving the undesirable outcome resulting from the need to exact petty revenge.

The model of the new theory, depicted in Figure 1.2, is based on some of the motivational theories outlined above. It is designed to help us understand how all petty behaviors fall into certain categories. Pettiness is redefined by the two newly identified dimensions of intensity and severity. The y axis measures the "intensity" of the petty behavior (from "simply offensive" to "vengefully malicious") and the x axis measures the "severity" of the outcomes of the behavior (from "inconsequential" to "consequential"). Intensity and severity intersect to yield four quadrants, each quadrant a category of petty behavior.

How Pettiness Rears Its Ugly (and Funny) Head

Over the course of the last year, my research team and I have conducted a broad study to identify pettiness and how it manifests itself in the workplace. We consulted more than 15,000 business professionals from a wide array of industries and disciplines and asked them to share their stories of pettiness so that we could learn firsthand what they considered to be petty behavior. The participants described actual incidents and chose a category based on one of the quadrants of the model.

The four categories of incidents are:

1. Trivial: Annoying, unpleasant behavior that produces no measurable outcome. (simply offensive/inconsequential)

2. Minor: Obnoxious, mean-spirited or self-serving behavior that others notice, but for which the repercussions are not serious. (vengefully malicious/inconsequential)

3. Major: Disagreeable behavior that causes short-term damage to an individual or organization. (simply offensive/consequential)

4. Significant: Destructive, infuriating behavior that results in lasting, unrecoverable damage to one's career or reputation or that negatively affects an organization's goodwill or finances. (vengefully malicious/consequential)

What we learned was absolutely astounding, as you will see for yourself when you read the stories in the next chapters and review the findings of the 2019 SHRM Pettiness in the Workplace Survey at the end of the book.

Here's what really jumped out at us from our research:

• Less than one percent of respondents said they never witnessed petty behaviors in their workplace; and

• Of the 99 percent who encounter petty behaviors in their workplace, three out of four witnessed an incident in which no action was taken against the individual engaging in the behavior.

The big picture was no less surprising. First and foremost, it's clear that pettiness abounds in all enterprises, like an endless negative energy source.

Second, pettiness takes many shapes and forms, which relates to third: people are extremely creative, both in the intensity of their petty behaviors and in how they interpret the severity of the outcomes of those behaviors.

Fourth, people want to eradicate pettiness, but aren't always sure how to go about it. (Hint: the place to start is from within yourself; then with Chapter 8.) When there is no action taken in response to pettiness, its targets and witnesses eventually distrust their leaders and lose their morale — and the behaviors continue.

To discourage petty behaviors in the workplace, organizations must point them out and describe their effects. Management and HR can implement intervention techniques, such as individual coaching sessions and performance improvement plans. You'll read about some of these organizational responses in the next chapters. You'll also read about the substantial number of people who continued their petty behaviors, for whom the ultimate intervention was implemented: termination of their jobs.

Best lesson learned from this project: People are funny! Many of our survey participants apparently shared their experiences both as a means of catharsis and as an excuse to tell a wild tale. Some incidents rival the best shaggy-dog stories you've ever heard.

We painstakingly culled this dubious treasure trove down to the funniest, most interesting incidents of pettiness ever reported. We interviewed the reporters to gather more background and context. We double-checked their categorizations. Finally, we removed information that could identify the people and organization involved. All the stories you are about to read are true; they're only missing names and some extraneous details. This was done to protect the storytellers as well as ourselves — not a petty consideration.

Additional fun fact: It only seemed fair to include a couple of stories recounting my own battles with pettiness. Enjoy trying to figure out which ones they are!

Examples of Petty Behavior

Chapters 2 to 5 recount actual stories of everyday, real-life petty behaviors in the workplace, as told by witnesses to the events or by the players themselves. Names, locations and other uniquely identifying details have been removed, but these anecdotes are 100 percent authentic.

Some accounts are cringeworthy, some are darkly amusing, some end on a positive note. But they are not surprising. All of us can recognize our own missteps in these tales; who among us has never succumbed to short-circuited thinking or done something just plain mean? Our fellow humans were there to see what happened, or they bore the brunt of it. They lived to tell the kinds of tales collected in these pages.

Practicing HR professionals were asked to share their stories so that we could learn firsthand what they considered to be petty behavior. The contributors work in a wide array of industries and disciplines across the U.S. and around the world, occupying positions at every level of authority and responsibility from intern to CEO. They were asked to categorize their incidents based on the intensity of the petty behavior and the severity of the outcome, as described in the Four-Quadrant Model of Pettiness introduced here.

Close to 300 incidents were compiled and compared for common threads and themes. We chose a representative sample of the issues that people encountered most often, and from that list culled the most interesting to feature in the book. We excluded incidents of behavior that was clearly illegal (but see Chapter 6) or subject to civil penalties.

In reviewing these incidents, we discovered that petty behavior is everywhere. It's a worldwide problem that must be managed by organizations everywhere, every day. From the tales told herein, there are lessons to be learned.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Price of Pettiness"
by .
Copyright © 2019 SHRM.
Excerpted by permission of Society for Human Resource Management.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

• • Chapter - 01: Studying Pettiness Scientifically;
  • Chapter - 02: Examples of Petty Behavior: Trivial Incidents;
  • Chapter - 03: Examples of Petty Behavior: Minor Incidents;
  • Chapter - 04: Examples of Petty Behavior: Major Incidents;
  • Chapter - 05: Examples of Petty Behavior: Significant Incidents;
  • Chapter - 06: That’s Not Petty, That’s Criminal!;
  • Chapter - 07: Stomping Out Most Pettiness;