Mandating Positivity: Effective?

Creating a positive work environment sounds like a noble aspiration for both businesses and the people who work for them. No one ever says that they want to work in a negative environment, after all, or even in a blasé one. We come across an employee handbook whenever we join a new organization requiring workers “to maintain a positive work environment in a manner that is conducive to effective working relationships.”

There is, of course, a perfectly sound legal reason for this seemingly odd decision. The wording in the employee manual regarding the “positive work environment,” the board held, was “ambiguous and vague” enough to have a chilling effect on the right of employees to speak freely and to organize, rights guaranteed under the National Labor Relations Act. Because the “positive work environment” was never explicitly described, workers would have to err on the side of over-sensitivity—steering clear of “potentially controversial but protected communication in the workplace,” as the ruling put it—lest they be punished.

The law has its own imperatives, but if you took the same work-environment mandate and put it through a different intellectual grinder—in this case, social science—would you come up with a different result? If we agree that a positive environment is a worthy goal, we still have to agree on how, exactly, to foster such an environment. Research certainly suggests that people thrive in positive and supportive spaces: they are happy and satisfied; they are motivated and optimistic, setting higher goals and working harder and longer; they are creative; they are less likely to burn out and more likely to stick with a company or project. But can you actually create positivity by mandating it?

Worrying about whether or not you’re in violation of a feel-good policy and constantly monitoring yourself for slipups takes a mental toll. More than two decades of research suggests that thought suppression, or trying to stifle your initial impulses in favor of something else, can result in mental strain and may also impair other types of thinking—memory, self-control, problem solving, motivation, perceptiveness. When we are actively monitoring ourselves, our mental energy for other things suffers. The result is not only a less-than-positive work environment but also workers who are less-than-optimally productive. In other words, it’s bad business.

What they found was an inverted-U relationship between rule explicitness and effectiveness: if rules were overly vague or overly prescriptive, they had a demotivating effect. (Customers, too, were disappointed, giving both employees and their shopping experiences lower ratings.) Where the rules generally had their intended effect was in the moderate range: when there were some explicit guidelines, but flexibility in how they were to be implemented. A second study, of a hundred and seventy-five salespeople, found the relationship to hold for sales numbers as well: sales were higher in environments with moderate rules, while environments with too few or too many rules suffered. The highest performers of all were those in a moderately regulated environment who also felt a high degree of autonomy, as determined by their responses to a single statement: “My job permits me to decide on my own how to go about doing the work.” In other words, people want to feel in control. They want to be afforded respect and to determine on their own how to act; it is this autonomy that helps foster emotional positivity. Grandey suggests we are all still a bit like our two-year-old selves: tell a toddler exactly what to do and what not to do, and she balks. Let her figure it out within a certain framework, and she is happy.

So it turns out that enforcing a generalized positivity can create problems in the realm of psychological motivation as well as in the legal realm. The issue of how to encourage workplace positivity raises another problem, which is the possibility of suppressing freedom of expression. In asking for a “positive” environment, you can promote your own agenda and reprimand anyone who doesn’t fit with your concept of positivity at that particular moment.

One can only hope—positively, optimistically hope—that the decision presages a broader understanding of a deeper truth: we all deserve a positive environment, but that very positivity is at risk when we try to force it rather than fostering it by example.

Thanks for the read!