Costly Competence?

A new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that competent people aren’t always happy about it.

(Nice popular-level summary of the findings here.)

Other people tend to give competent folk more work than they would give less-competent folk, and they tend to overestimate the ease and speed of a task when a competent person is doing it.  In their turn, competent folk perceive these effects at work and at home, and feel overburdened and dissatisfied because of it.

It seems helpful to place this study in context: the authors begin with the already documented positive effects of competence and self-control.  Competent, disciplined folk enjoy material and personal benefits from these personality traits; they are more successful in work and in life.  The study’s authors wanted to show that these are not unmixed blessings, however.

It also seems worth noting that the precise cause of competent folks’ feelings of dissatisfaction and overwork may be hard to pin down.

Is it a fitting emotional response to an inherently unfair situation?  The study’s authors seem to suggest so: if managers, like the study participants, assign more competent people more tasks than but equal pay to less competent people, a feeling of being used seems justified.  Their proposed solution, that managers increase compensation along with increased responsibility, does seem to make sense.

Incidentally, the Atlantic piece above describing the study correctly noted the need for follow-up studies that were more attentive to gender: there is hard evidence that my own industry, in general, asks more from female faculty, undervalues the quality and quantity of their work relative to their male peers, and undercompensates them relative to their male peers.  Race would be another productive line of inquiry: to what extent are successful minority employees disadvantaged by their own advantages of skill and motivation?

But might there be other factors at work, as well?

Might there be a relationship between competence and depression or anxiety?  Are the psychological factors that contribute to high self-discipline and self-motivation also factors that lead to negative self-appraisal or a negative view of the world?  There is evidence of a correlation between high intelligence and depression.  Could there be a similar correlation at work here?

Or is it possible that the stress of greater work, more complex work, higher-powered (and thus higher-pressure) work is inherently fatiguing?  Is it possible that successful people tend to be dissatisfied at work because their work is hard, and being asked to do more of it is even harder?  If so, the suggestion that the study authors give–that competent people be given more work but a correspondingly higher paycheck–may be exactly wrong.  It may be that what competent people need is more vacation time, or periodic respites from high-stress positions, or, simply, permission to be less-than-stellar from time to time.

Or perhaps the very association between effectiveness and compensation is what leads to dissatisfaction.  We live in a fictional but presumptive meritoracy–we tend to think people who do more and better work should get more rewards for it, and many people think they actually do.

There’s lots of evidence that the latter is false, but I’m not convinced that even the former should be presumed to be true.

Imagine, for example, being a sixty-three-year-old, thirty-five year veteran of an organization.  Imagine having been the super-competent one for thirty of those thirty-five years.  Wouldn’t it be nice to work for a company that didn’t dock your pay, or demote you, or even fire you, for being a little slower than you used to be?  Wouldn’t it be nice to have coworkers that respected your experience and valued your wisdom and supported your continued employment, even if they were a little faster on their feet than you?  Wouldn’t it be nice to work for someone who could evaluate the present justly without forgetting the past?

Or imagine a manager that fully respected your competence, paid you generously, and understood and appreciated all that you contributed to the company.  Isn’t it possible not to be resentful if someone else is paid the same as you, even if he is less effective?  Does your pay suddenly become unfair just because someone less effective than you is paid the same?  What if your boss has super-generous policies toward, say, disabled people?  Or people with large families?  Or people supporting dying parents?  Wouldn’t you like to work for an employer with that kind of generosity?  Even if you weren’t benefiting from it rightthisverysecond, isn’t there something to be said for unmerited kindness?

I feel sure there must be someone who said that kind of thing before.

But the presumption that began the above paragraph is counterfactual, for most of us: we are rarely fortunate enough to work with and for uniformly respectful and appreciative people, who compensate generously and assign work prudently.  It’s true that genuine inequities of pay do exist, and are often based on frank discrimination or more subtle forms of social injustice.

But it may also be true that we could all stand to be slower to resent the unmerited blessings that others enjoy, even if only because we may some day wish to benefit from some unmerited favor ourselves.