The Snitch

Tired of puckering up to your boss yet?

Why does it seem as though every office has a person who thinks that the way to move up the corporate ladder is to kiss the rear end of their boss?

Not sure who’s a brown-noser? They’re the ones who voice the loudest support for all the supervisor’s bad ideas or laugh the loudest at the bosses’ lame jokes. They’re the ones who stay late just so their boss sees them “working” at their computer, even though all they are doing is just surfing YouTube. They’re the ones who gives the biggest presents on their supervisors’ birthdays and write declarations of loyalty on their bosses’ Facebook pages.

Unfortunately, it seems as though the art of sucking up could give you a boost in your career.

A piece of research in the US has found that challenging a CEO less, giving more compliments and doing personal favors increased the likelihood of being appointed to a corporate board by 64% where the CEO was already a director.

Surveying more than 1,000 managers and CEOs at 350 of the Fortune 500 list, the study aimed at measuring the three components of ingratiating behavior described in social influence literature: other-enhancement, opinion conformity, and favor rendering.

After two years of research, the study found that ingratiating, or charming and pleasing behaviour was the “strongest single predictive factor for obtaining board appointments”.

Even Ithai Stern, one of the two researchers and assistant professor of management & organizations at Kellogg School of Management was taken aback by the results. “We were surprised by the sheer magnitude of the effect,” he said.

On one hand, it’s understand why this can possibly happen in the workplace. Bosses – like all other humans -  want to work in a pleasant environment where they are well-liked by their peers and don’t want to work with people who are antagonistic and constantly having to battle with.

And that is where brown-nosers come in. They compliment the bosses on a job well-done (even though the opposite might be true), let bosses feel good about themselves and let them know that it’s not so lonely at the top afterall.

But on the other hand, the idea that a brown-noser who, not by the merit of his work, can get promoted quickly creates a toxic environment where favouritism often rears its ugly head. Good employees who don’t play by the game get disillusioned when their brown-nosing peers get promoted and the whole office is just turned into a race of who can be the bigger suck-up.

Furthermore, the study also found that minorities and women faced an even greater hurdle. The survey stated that the “importance of ingratiation in recommendations for future board appointments is even greater for managers who are female or ethnic minorities;” and that they must engage in a particularly high level of ingratiating behaviour to gain board appointments.

In other words, they have to really master the art of sucking up more than the rest.

But what do you think? Is this scenario caused by the lack of transparent HR processes? Or should our ‘guanxi’ and relationships factor into who gets promoted and who doesn’t? Should we discourage such behaviours, and how can we do it?

(Research methodology here)