To Be or Not to Be Your Authentic Self? Catering to Others' Expectations and Interests Hinders Performance

Francesca  Gino; Ovul  Sezer; Laura  Huang

Article | Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes | May 2020

To Be or Not to Be Your Authentic Self? Catering to Others' Expectations and Interests Hinders Performance

by Francesca Gino, Ovul Sezer and Laura Huang

Abstract

When approaching interpersonal first meetings (e.g., job interviews), people often cater to the target’s interests and expectations to make a good impression and secure a positive outcome such as being offered the job (pilot study). This strategy is distinct from other approaches identified in prior impression management research (Studies 1A, 1B and 1C), and does not produce the benefits people expect. In a field study in which entrepreneurs pitched their ideas to potential investors (Study 2), catering harmed investors’ evaluations, while being authentic improved them. People experience greater anxiety and instrumentality when they cater to another person’s preferences than when they behave authentically (Studies 3A and 3B). Compared to behaving authentically or to a control condition, catering harms performance because trying to anticipate and fulfill others’ preferences feels instrumental and increases anxiety (Studies 4 and 5). Taken together, these results suggest that although people believe using catering in interpersonal first meetings will lead to successful outcomes, the opposite is true: catering creates undesirable feelings of instrumentality for the caterer, increases anxiety, and ultimately hinders performance.

Keywords: Authenticity; catering; honesty; selection; impression management; Interpersonal Communication; Behavior; Performance;

Format: Print

Find at Harvard Read Now

Citation:

Gino, Francesca, Ovul Sezer, and Laura Huang. "To Be or Not to Be Your Authentic Self? Catering to Others' Expectations and Interests Hinders Performance." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 158 (May 2020): 83–100.

Article | Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

Conversational Receptiveness: Expressing Engagement with Opposing Views

M. Yeomans, J. Minson, H. Collins, H. Chen and F. Gino

We examine “conversational receptiveness”—the use of language to communicate one’s willingness to thoughtfully engage with opposing views. We develop an interpretable machine-learning algorithm to identify the linguistic profile of receptiveness (Studies 1A-B). We then show that in contentious policy discussions, government executives who were rated as more receptive—according to our algorithm and their partners but not their own self-evaluations—were considered better teammates, advisors, and workplace representatives (Study 2). Furthermore, using field data from a setting where conflict management is endemic to productivity, we show that conversational receptiveness at the beginning of a conversation forestalls conflict escalation at the end. Specifically, Wikipedia editors who write more receptive posts are less prone to receiving personal attacks from disagreeing editors (Study 3). We develop a “receptiveness recipe” intervention based on our algorithm. We find that writers who follow the recipe are seen as more desirable partners for future collaboration and their messages are seen as more persuasive (Study 4). Overall, we find that conversational receptiveness is reliably measurable, has meaningful relational consequences, and can be substantially improved using our intervention.

Keywords: receptiveness; natural language processing; disagreement; Interpersonal Communication; Relationships; Conflict Management;

Citation:

Yeomans, M., J. Minson, H. Collins, H. Chen, and F. Gino. "Conversational Receptiveness: Expressing Engagement with Opposing Views." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 160 (September 2020): 131–148. View Details

Cite View Details Read Now

Social exclusion is a painful yet common experience in many people’s personal and professional lives. This research demonstrates that feeling authentic serves as a buffer against social rejection, leading people to experience less social pain. Across five studies, using different manipulations of authenticity, different paradigms to create social exclusion, and different measures of feeling rejected, we found that experiencing authenticity led participants to appraise situations as less threatening and to experience lower feelings of rejection from the social exclusion. We also found that perceived threat explains these effects. Our findings suggest that authenticity may be an underused resource for people who perceive themselves to be, or actually are, socially excluded or ostracized. This research has diverse and important implications: Interventions that increase authenticity could be used to reduce perceptions of threatening situations and the pain of impending exclusion episodes in situations ranging from adjustment to college to organizational orientation programs.

Faculty & Research

To Be or Not to Be Your Authentic Self? Catering to Others' Expectations and Interests Hinders Performance

Abstract

Citation:

About the Authors

More from these Authors