Metadata
- Author:: Jennifer L. Berdahl, Peter Glick, Marianne Cooper
- Full Title:: How Masculinity Contests Undermine Organizations, and What to Do About It
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: ✍️ Sin machirulos hay paraiso. Una charla heterofriendly sobre management
- URL:: https://hbr.org/2018/11/how-masculinity-contests-undermine-organizations-and-what-to-do-about-it
- Finished date:: 2023-01-21
Highlights
Why do companies get caught up in illegal behavior, harassment, and toxic leadership? Our research identifies an underlying cause: what we call a “masculinity contest culture.” This kind of culture endorses winner-take-all competition, where winners demonstrate stereotypically masculine traits such as emotional toughness, physical stamina, and ruthlessness. It produces organizational dysfunction, as employees become hyper competitive to win. (View Highlight)
We surveyed thousands of workers in the U.S. and Canada from different organizations. Respondents rated whether various masculine qualities were highly prized in their workplace; they also reported on other organizational characteristics and their personal outcomes. Four masculine norms, which together define masculinity contest culture, emerged as highly correlated with each other and with organizational dysfunction: (View Highlight)
- “Show no weakness”.
- “Strength and stamina”: a workplace that prizes strong or athletic people (even in white collar work) or those who show off their endurance (e.g., by working extreme hours).
- “Put work first”: a workplace where nothing outside the organization (e.g., family) can interfere with work, where taking a break or a leave represents an impermissible lack of commitment.
- “Dog eat dog”: a workplace filled with ruthless competition, where “winners” (the most masculine) focus on defeating “losers” (the less masculine), and no one is trusted.
In many cultures around the world, someone becomes a “man” by behaving in ways that conform with cultural beliefs about what men are like — dominant, tough, risk taking, aggressive, rule breaking. (View Highlight)
The competition breeds unspoken anxiety (because admitting anxiety is seen as weak) and defensiveness (e.g., blaming subordinates for any failure), undermining cooperation, psychological safety, trust in coworkers, and the ability to admit uncertainty or mistakes (View Highlight)
Organizations that score high on masculinity contest culture tend to have toxic leaders who abuse and bully others to protect their own egos; low psychological safety such that employees do not feel accepted or respected, feeling unsafe to express themselves, take risks, or share new ideas; low work/family support among leaders, discouraging work-life balance; sexist climates where women experience either hostility or patronizing behavior*; harassment and bullying*, including sexual harassment, racial harassment, social humiliation and physical intimidation*; higher rates of burnout and turnover;* and higher rates of illness and depression among both male and female employees. (View Highlight)
… the association between toxic masculinity and success is so strong that people feel compelled to keep playing the game, despite the dysfunctional behavior it produces, and (View Highlight)
has shown that people in masculinity contest cultures think their coworkers embrace these norms when in fact they do not, breeding pervasive but silent dissatisfaction alongside active complicity as people stay quiet to prove they belong. (View Highlight)
A New York Times investigation described Uber as a “Hobbesian environment…in which workers are pitted against one another and where a blind eye is turned to infractions from top performers.” (View Highlight)