Workplace status shown via emails
So you spent part of the morning crafting a long, thoughtful email to your boss, updating her on your project.
Fifteen seconds after sending it, you receive a reply that reads: “OK.”
It’s hard to squeeze much satisfaction out of that two-letter response. Would a “nice job!” or “great to hear!” have been too much to ask?
While there’s a reasonable chance the boss’ terse response was a side effect of a busy schedule, unbalanced email exchanges like this may also reflect our more deeply rooted sense of positioning in the workplace power structure. Whether we’re communicating face to face or through the winding tubes of the Interwebs, we remain creatures evolved from apes, and our behaviour can still mirror that of primates.
Dario Maestripieri, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and author of the book Games Primates Play, writes: “Although our high-tech way of communicating might seem to preclude a strong influence of our evolutionary past on the way we act, the rules regulating primate relationships resurface even when we sit down at our keyboards to catch up with friends or reply to work memos.”
I spoke with Maestripieri, and he said email exchanges remind him of the way primates communicate, particularly with regard to the role of dominance in a relationship.
The long, thoughtful email a worker sends to his boss is akin to a lower-status chimp starting to groom a more dominant one. The low-status chimp will spend a long time cleaning the boss chimp, hoping the dominant creature will return the favour.
But, Maestripieri said, “Usually the dominant one waits around a bit, and then maybe grooms the subordinate for a short period of time and then stops.”
Thus the boss’ short reply to a worker’s detailed note.
“You can tell whether there’s a difference in status from who starts the conversation, from how quickly the reply occurs,” Maestripieri said.
“Even though we use emails, it’s about how long our messages are, whether we start a conversation unsolicited. That all reflects dominance. It’s not random.”