Knowing how to get the best out of an employee can be difficult for bosses and many things can make it harder. Practical issues like particularly tough operational challenges or dissatisfaction with pay are at least easily visible if not always easily resolved.
But psychological issues can be a lot harder to see, and none more so than an employee’s attitudes and expectations of their boss. These can be shaped by the culture they come from or their experiences of previous leaders, especially if they were bad bosses.
Often the most powerful influence on their expectations of their boss is the degree to which they remind them of their parents. So, how can you identify this and manage it?
How experiences shape attitudes toward bosses
Ideally, people should treat all their bosses as individuals. And they do, to some degree. However, studies show that most people tend to have a more or less consistent approach with all authority figures. Their attitudes towards sources of personal authority, such as their boss, tend to be similar to impersonal sources of authority, like the government and police.
These generalized attitudes towards authority are forged in people’s earliest relationships. Indeed, studies have found a consistent approach to authority figures in children just a year and a half old. Most of us tend to rebel a bit in our teenage years and become a little less conforming later. But other than that, our attitudes to authority don’t tend to change much.
How attitudes change behaviors
Examining how our relationships with parents can affect us in later years, researchers have identified two key mechanisms: anxiety and resentment.
First, experiences with parents that cause anxiety about our relationship with them tend to make us more attentive to them, keener to please them, and more compliant with them. And over time, these tendencies spread into our relationships with all other authority figures.
For example, children who grow up insecure in their attachment to their parents (anxious about their relationship with them) tend to be more compliant. Similarly, children who grow up with very dominating, strict, or critical parents also tend to become more obedient. Children who grow up in households with a high level of conflict tend to be more attentive to what their parents want of them.
On the other hand, children who experience a high amount of anger or resentment towards their parents, or who have less happy memories of being with them, tend to grow into adults who are less trusting of authority figures, have more negative expectations of them, and conform less with them. Infants as young as just nine months who have less harmonious relationships with their parents appear less in sync with them and show higher levels of noncompliance three years later. And adults who remember their parents as neglectful or indifferent to their needs tend to be more resistant toward authority.
Why this matters
So, early experiences that cause us to associate our parents with either anxiety or aggressive emotions can forge within us an underlying tendency to associate all authority figures with these feelings. As a leader of people who bring these tendencies into work with them, knowing what these influences are, how to spot them, and what to do about them can be vital.
The reason is that anxiety about authority and resistance towards it can have positive and negative consequences for people’s performance. An employee who’s keen to please their boss can be great. They’ll focus on what we want and work hard to get it done.
But if this tendency is too strong, it can make people less likely to offer opinions freely that they think we might disagree with, less likely to bring us bad news, and less likely to take the initiative unless we ask them to.
Similarly, having an employee who doesn’t automatically comply with authority can be useful, as they can be independent-minded. But again, when overdone it can be personally tiring for you as a leader and undermine teamwork and what you are trying to achieve.
What you can do
So, how do you spot it and what can you do about it?
Spotting authority anxiety most often shows through either ingratiation or conformity. See either of those in an employee and you probably have someone anxious about authority. On the other hand, if an employee is willing to disagree with you or gets defensive when you question them, or if they just keep their distance from you, they may resist or be distrustful of your authority.
As for how you can manage it, there are three main things you can do.
Identify triggers: Employees may well transfer their attitudes and expectations of authority onto their relationship with you just because you are an authority figure. But often there will be specific things you do that can trigger them to unconsciously transfer these attitudes onto you.
The most common triggers are giving people feedback, directing them to do something, or asking them for an opinion. So, look out for how employees respond when you do these things because these are the moments when their attitudes towards authority are most likely to be visible. As you do this, remember what you are looking for is signs that they are either anxious about authority or resistant to it.
Another way to do this with a new employee is to ask them if they were to write a user manual for a new boss on how to manage them and get the best from them, what it would say. And ask in particular what warnings, or things to avoid doing, it would list.
Table the issue: So, if you spot a pattern in how an employee behaves towards you, tell them. Make sure to do it as if you are curious, introducing it by saying something like “I notice that . . . do you notice or recognize this?”
If they agree, you can ask them if this is something they just do with you or something they’ve done with other bosses, too. If it’s only with you, then the issue may just be with you. But if they’ve noticed it elsewhere, then it’s likely that it’s a generalized attitude toward authority.
Remember you don’t have to ask them about their relationships with their parents, and in fact, it may be better not to. The objective is to just identify patterns and see if they agree. You can then discuss with them whether their response is always useful and what both they and you can do to change it.
Watch yourself: Employees aren’t the only ones bringing age-old attitudes and expectations into the room. You do, too. You carry expectations of what being in charge involves and how employees should respond, and they may not always be useful.
For instance, your natural style may be to give orders and be more directive. And that can be good. But it may not be what individual employees need to bring out the best in them. If your beliefs of how you should act as a leader coincide with their expectations of authority figures, then you are more likely to trigger them to transfer their attitudes about authority to you. And if your beliefs clash with their expectations, they are less likely to enjoy working for you.
Either way, taking the time to talk about what they expect of you as a leader, what they want and what they don’t, will leave you more informed about how to bring out the best in them.
