Читать книгу Leading from the Middle - Scott Mautz - Страница 12

You've probably heard the term “monkey in the middle.” Researchers from Manchester and Liverpool University studied this exact subject, spending 600 hours watching female monkeys in the middle of their hierarchy.⁷ They recorded the range of social behavior, including aggressive behavior like threats, chases, and slaps, submissive behaviors like grimacing and retreating, and nurturing behaviors like embracing and grooming. They then measured fecal matter for traces of stress hormones (I'll pass on that duty). They discovered that monkeys in the middle of their hierarchy experienced the most social and physical stress because they deal with the most conflict, you guessed it, up, down, and across their organization. This directly corresponds to what researchers find in the monkeys' slightly brighter cousins, the human beings. In fact, a study of 320,000 employees found that the bottom 5 percent in terms of engagement and happiness levels weren't the people with poor performance ratings or those so new they hadn't moved on yet from an ill‐fitting job, but five to ten‐year tenured employees in mid‐level roles with good performance ratings.⁸

In another big, multi‐industry study, researchers from Columbia University and the University of Toronto found that employees in mid‐level roles in their organization had much higher rates of depression and anxiety than employees at the top or bottom of the organizational hierarchy. In fact, 18 percent of supervisors and managers experienced symptoms of depression (40 percent said the depression derived from stress), 51 percent of managers were “constantly worried” about work, and 43 percent said the pressure they were under was excessive.⁹ Eric Anicich of the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business says the constant micro‐transitions from frequent role changes are psychologically challenging to the point of detriment.¹⁰ For example, disengaging in a high deference task to engage in a high assertiveness task leads to even more stress and anxiety, and a host of related physical problems like hypertension and heart disease.