Rules of Engagement

THE THREAT OF THREATENED EGOTISM

Millennials bring many positive qualities — but at what cost?

by E. L. Kersten

Recent years have seen a great deal written about the new generation of workers who are entering the labor force, frequently referred to as millennials.

Analysts tend to agree that this generation is going to have a profound impact on the world of work, partly because of its size — which some estimate to be about the same as that of baby boomers — and partly due to the expectations and assumptions that millennials bring to the workplace. Their defining characteristic is an unapologetic sense of entitlement. Millennials were the centers of attention in their homes, and a great deal of their family lives revolved around helping them pursue their various interests. Their parents worked hard to build their self-esteem by encouraging them, mentoring them, and making them believe that they were special.

Millennials were also taught to challenge status and authority — but to forgo the gratuitous rebellion of their boomer parents. As a result, millennials bring to the workplace a great deal of optimism and ambition, combined with a casual disregard for hierarchy and tradition. They’re willing to work hard if they can have a significant, identifiable impact on something they find valuable — though they’re not interested in spending years paying their dues by laboring in obscurity just because that’s what others who came before them had to do.

It should come as no surprise that people respond to millennials in dramatically different ways. Plenty of executives and recruiters are appalled by this new generation’s presumptuousness. Others are more optimistic, seeing millennials as a vibrant, confident force that is going to shake things up and change the way we think about life and work. Nevertheless, even the most sanguine concede that millennials are often ill-prepared for business challenges. Their parents have taken care of them their entire lives. They’ve lived in a world that has been largely accommodating and affirming. As a result, they have not developed the social and psychological skills necessary to thrive in a less supportive environment — specifically, one that threatens their sense of entitlement. This has the potential to be a serious problem, not just for millennials but for their co-workers and their managers as well.

Looking to explain a great many social and psychological maladies — ranging from interpersonal violence to substance abuse to suicide — many experts point to low selfesteem. But some of the best research on self-esteem over the last two decades refutes that assumption, instead blaming a state of “threatened egotism” for many psychological and interpersonal pathologies.

Threatened egotism occurs when people or events undermine an individual’s high but unstable self-esteem. It doesn’t affect those with a stable self-esteem, since external threats are unlikely to faze such people. And those with a low self-esteem are unsusceptible to threatened egotism because external threats simply reinforce already low self-perceptions.

Millennials, then, are especially vulnerable to threatened egotism, because their inflated self-perceptions are generally grounded in an affirming and supportive social environment rather than in realworld achievement. As a result, millennials are likely to possess a host of interpersonal pathologies and behavioral maladaptations that have been linked to threatened egotism, four of which are especially salient to the workplace:

Violence and incivility. Research has consistently shown a linear relationship between threatened egotism and interpersonal violence. The higher the level of unstable self-esteem, the greater the likelihood the individual will choose aggression in the face of an ego threat.

Millennials entering the workforce, therefore, may be one explanation for why most people believe that incivility is on the rise and getting worse. Moreover, such behavior is costly. USC’s Christine Porath and Thunderbird School of Global Management’s Christine Pearson found that an executive spends as much as 13 percent of his time resolving conflicts among employees. Meanwhile, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t by Stanford University’s Robert Sutton provides a stunning array of examples, both crude and subtle, of how people are aggressive with each other at work. Certainly, a little old-fashioned humility would be a welcome relief.

Revenge at a cost to self. In many situations, people are willing to forgo acts of revenge when they feel such actions aren’t worth the potential costs to themselves. Those susceptible to threatened egotism, however, are willing to exact revenge anyway.

For example, a baseball pitcher may consistently pitch the ball on the inside to force the batter to step out of the batter’s box. The batter and his teammates will generally endure the intimidation as part of the game, knowing that if they respond angrily, they would incur fines and penalties. Occasionally, though, the pitcher will throw a pitch that is interpreted as being especially provocative and disrespectful — i.e., a threat to the egos of the batter and his teammates. In that case, it’s not uncommon to see the entire team pour onto the field, where a brawl ensues. Thus, in the face of threatened egotism, the team is willing to suffer loss to exact revenge.

Self-handicapping. It may seem counterintuitive, but many people purposefully behave in ways that objectively increase their likelihood of failure. For example, employees may forgo working on an important project by wasting time on less important tasks. From a threatened-egotism perspective, they do this because they are simultaneously defending their egos against the implications of a possible failure and laying the groundwork for an ego boost in the event of a highly improbable success. By not investing the appropriate time on the project because they were “too busy” with other tasks, they provide for themselves a ready-made excuse. In such a case, it renders an assessment of their competence ambiguous. After all, it’s possible they would have done really well if they only had more time to work on the project. In contrast, if they had spent all of the requisite time working on the project and still performed poorly, that would provide a stronger case that their failure was due to incompetence rather than an external, uncontrollable variable. By the same token, if they perform well, even after they were presumably too busy to work on the project, that suggests that they are highly competent.

Destructive persistence. Obviously, persistence in the face of difficulties and setbacks is an important contributor to eventual success, but it’s also important to know when to throw in the towel. When egos influence a decision, people are more likely to persist in the face of challenges. This dynamic is amplified when they make the decision in the face of overwhelming dissent, controversy, or criticism from others — which may lead to a case of destructive persistence. To follow the advice of others would be admitting failure. A good example of this occurred when French securities trader Jérôme Kerviel — himself an earlystage millennial — lost €4.9 billion at Société Générale in early 2008. After he lost on his first big trade, he covered his tracks and placed even bigger trades because he thought he could earn back the money he had lost. His trading spun out of control until he was eventually caught. His response was another good example of threatened egotism: Rather than accept responsibility for losing billions of dollars, he blamed his employer for having insufficient oversight.

Despite these and other problems that millennials may bring, there is still good reason to be excited by their drive and dynamism — but we should be clear that their positive attributes carry a cost.

E. L. KERSTEN E. L. KERSTEN is co-founder and COO of Despair Inc. and author of The Art of Demotivation: A Visionary Guide for Transforming Your Company’s Least Valuable Asset—Your Employees.