Dark Social

Understanding the Darker Side of Work, Personality and Social Media

Ian MacRae

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Business
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781472983138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Comportamento dei consumatori
• Index: Business

Shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2022 From Donald Trump's outrageous tweets to the impact of the GRU (Russia's military intelligence agency) on foreign elections, through to echo chambers and amplification by bots and networks - the negative side of social media is becoming ever more apparent. Now far removed from a comfortable landscape of cat videos and family pictures, social media is now open to exploitation from a range of sources, from disgruntled employees to 'fake news'. The negative impact of social media upon the workplace can have damaging consequences for businesses. Reputations can be ruined overnight, employees can manipulate social media feeds to their own advantage, and the boundaries between professional and personal social media conduct can become dangerously blurred. Dark Social is an approachable and widely applicable guide to the dangers of social media, and the steps that can be taken by businesses to avoid any negative consequences as a result of social media activity. Despite these risks, social media should not be neglected - it has become a fundamental part of business literacy and is now an essential element of any successful marketing & PR campaign. Drawing upon illustrative case studies and organizational psychology, Dark Social is a timely and fascinating insight into the darker side of social media.

Section Two

The Continuum of Personality and Optimality

6

The dark side of brightness

What is healthy functioning? What is a healthy level of a personality trait? The answer depends on whom you ask and in what context. In a work context, there tends to be optimal levels of different traits depending on the job and the situation. Being exceptionally perfectionistic can be useful for complex, detail-oriented tasks, but it can be a distraction when it leads people to focus on minutiae and forget about the bigger picture.

Self-esteem is another factor (which will be discussed in much more detail in Chapter 13), which tends to be helpful in modest doses. Inflated self-esteem is sometimes helpful in the short-term but can lead to problems in the longer term when confidence outpaces ability. Someone who is good at showing off their talents is more likely to get hired or promoted. But if their talents and abilities do not measure up to their boasts, then reality eventually catches up with them. We’ll discuss this, in relation to the Peter principle, later in this chapter.

Section 1 prepared the ground with discussions of general psychological principles, especially in social psychology. We talked about the social and environmental factors that shape people, impact how they learn, change behaviours and potentially can even lead a person astray.

This section will focus more specifically on how people’s personalities and attributes can interact with the environment to create success or failure, especially in the workplace.

The optimality model

What are the best personality traits to have? What is the right level of a trait to have? Some people assume more is always better and treat a personality test like an aptitude test. However, having a higher score on a personality test does not necessarily mean that a person’s traits are more adaptive.

Conscientiousness is a good example of this. People who are high in the conscientiousness trait tend to be more organized, better at setting goals, tend to be more intrinsically motivated and are more oriented towards long-term planning. Those are attributes that tend to be highly valued in many careers. However, there’s two things to consider.

First, while high conscientiousness may be optimal in some situations, and this is especially true in some careers, the optimal zone varies. While a company that is selecting someone for a senior leadership position like a CEO may have an extremely specific optimal range, the same may not be true for other workplaces or other social situations.

Corporate boards may want a highly driven, well-organized person with a great eye for detail to run their company. But are those the same traits you look for when deciding who to spend time with at a social situation outside of work? Perhaps not. If we want to hire someone for a position that requires sustained high performance, we are likely to look for someone with a commensurate level of conscientiousness. But if you are looking for someone to spend a relaxing Sunday afternoon with, perhaps that is not the same person and those traits are less desirable in a different environment.

Second, more is not necessarily better. Optimal scores do not necessarily mean the highest scores. Conscientiousness is a prime example because excessive conscientiousness can be counter-productive. There’s a level of organization and planning that is fairly helpful in day-to-day situations, and then there’s a level of planning, spending so much time out of the day organizing, making lists and goal setting that nothing productive gets accomplished. When rigid perfectionism is taken to the extreme, a person can be so critical of their own work and other people that nothing is ever good enough so nothing ever gets done. When normal personality traits go to extreme levels, they can become pathological.

Optimal in the context of general wellbeing

Optimal functioning is also quite different depending on whom you ask. For a psychotherapist, most people would be in the ‘normal’ range. Anyone within the normal range has a general degree of independence and ability to sustain themselves, they are capable of setting goals in the short- and longer-term and they can maintain positive relationships with other people. That is not to say we expect anyone to be perfect. Everyone has days or weeks where they struggle to motivate themselves and most people wrestle with their long-term career and lifetime goals at some point. Similarly, everyone will have disagreements, arguments and differences of opinion with their friends, family and colleagues from time to time.

All of life’s ups and downs are well within the range of psychologically ‘normal’ behaviour. The problem is when a person’s life is characterized by ongoing and persistent problems with setting any sort of realistic goals, or when someone’s relationships are chronically plagued with conflict throughout the course of their lifetime because they struggle to develop intimacy or empathy with other people. When these problems are persistent and widespread, then it may be a personality disorder. Sometimes people say ‘everyone else is the problem’, when the story of their life is that no one can be trusted; it’s not necessarily everyone else’s fault – sometimes the calls are coming from inside the house.

When we describe someone as healthy, or a psychiatrist might say ‘functional’, we tend to mean that they can live and adapt on their own, function in a social group and provide for their own basic needs. In this case, we are not concerned with what type of work they do, who is in their circle of friends, what goals they set for themselves, or what hobbies or careers they choose. Basically we’re just interested in whether or not they have the capacity to manage themselves and their relationships with others and that they don’t cause too much harm or distress to themselves or others. That’s a fairly basic level of functioning for most people, but it’s an everyday struggle for some.

Looking at these areas, we can evaluate people on four levels of functioning. The American Psychological Association (2013) lays out four core components that fit into two categories of personality functioning (or potential dysfunction).

A. Sense of self

1. Identity

The person is aware of themselves as separate from other people, they understand who they are outside of a relationship or group. They understand that their emotions are distinct from other people, and that their thoughts and emotions come from inside themselves, not from other people. They understand boundaries and can maintain appropriate boundaries depending on the role or situation they are in. They generally have an accurate understanding of their own capabilities and have a level of self-esteem commensurate with their abilities. They understand and can manage a range of emotions.

2. Self-direction

They have a realistic idea about their own capabilities and can set realistic goals. They understand the difference between their own thoughts and their own behaviour and don’t blur the lines between what they imagine they could do and what they have actually done. They also understand the appropriate standards of behaviour in a particular environment (they don’t expect constant praise for the most simple tasks, nor do they hold themselves to impossibly high standards).

B. Healthy relationships

3. Empathy

They need to be able to understand that other people have their own experiences and motivations that may be different from their own. Even if they disagree with others’ perspectives, they can still understand and appreciate others’ points of view. Most importantly, they understand the effects of their actions on other people and understand that not everyone will react the same way to their behaviour.

4. Intimacy

They can maintain mutually satisfactory relationships over long periods of time. They seek out and have interest in caring, close and reciprocal relationships. Importantly, they seek out activities and relationships that have mutual benefit, they understand that healthy relationships have elements of give and take, and they can be flexible in reacting to other people’s ideas, emotions and behaviour.

These levels of functioning are important and will be revisited throughout later chapters. Continuing from the previous examples, we can see what happens when conscientiousness becomes so excessive it is obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. Those four levels of functioning (Identity, Self-direction, Empathy and Intimacy) become dysfunction for someone with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (APA, 2013) or, as the normal range of obsessive-compulsive disorder will be referred to in this book, perfectionistic style.

How excessive conscientiousness becomes dysfunctional

Identity – The person’s sense of self is tied completely to workplace success or productivity; the person doesn’t know who they are or how to express themselves outside of their work.

Self-direction – Inflexible and unrealistic goals make success unachievable. Difficulty completing tasks because of unrealistic expectations.

Empathy – Difficulty understanding, appreciating or connecting with the feelings or behaviour of others. Has difficulty seeing value in other people’s definitions of success, fulfilment or happiness outside of work or productivity.

Intimacy – Relationships subordinate to work and productivity; stubbornness and rigid thinking makes it difficult to connect with others.

When we dive in a bit deeper, we can look at these different types of functioning either generally or specifically. For example, when looking at healthy relationships, it is important that people can have positive, reciprocal relationships in one or more areas of their lives (general functioning). Whereas when we look at more specific domains, like the workplace, there may be interpersonal problems at work that are not present in other parts of the person’s life. That’s a crucial distinction, because if someone is generally able to form and maintain positive relationships but unable to do so in a specific setting, then it’s important to look at the situational and environmental factors that could be at play.

When looking at personality disorder and dysfunction, generally these patterns would be persistent and pervasive in all relationships. People with narcissistic personality disorder (or confident style, see Chapter 13) have a limited capacity to recognize the feelings or needs of other people, except for the effect others can have on the person’s own self-esteem or sense of self-importance. A personality disorder like obsessive-compulsive personality disorder or narcissistic personality disorder is not something that someone can ‘turn off’ at home or at work or in certain environments; it pervades all situations and all relationships.

It is also relevant when considering a person’s health and psychological wellbeing in general compared with a specific job or role. Some people are perfectly capable of goal setting and maintaining empathetic and intimate relationships in general but find the demands of specific jobs are impossible. There’s nothing wrong with steering clear of some occupations and favouring others, selecting particular roles based on one’s own abilities and preferences. That tends to come with a healthy sense of self-awareness. Yet, often people get steered, goaded, flattered or persuaded into workplace roles and positions that they find are specifically dysfunctional, even though they are generally healthy and satisfied elsewhere.

Optimal in the context of workplace performance: the Peter principle

Most people get promoted to rise to their own level of incompetence. That’s the core idea of the Peter principle (Peter & Hull, 1969; Robson, 2020). Laurence J. Peter was a Canadian schoolteacher who, in the 1940s, saw things going wrong all around him. Wherever he looked people were failing, derailing and messing things up. Journalists, politicians, civil servants and corporate professionals: incompetence seemed to be everywhere.

Peter wrote a bestseller in 1969 to explain the phenomenon. Generally, people are selected into roles that they are expected to perform well in. When the right characteristics are selected for (experience, ability, intelligence, personality traits) the right position, the person tends to perform well. This person is then successful in their role, and they learn how to perform even more effectively in that role.

When people are high performers in a particular role for long enough, then they are identified as high potential and sel...