The Trick To Creating Superstar Employees? Think Of Them As Superstar Employees

Research shows that your attitude towards your employees may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you start treating everyone like they’re a superstar — and you really believe it — their behaviour will follow.

- Elizabeth Dunn

In 1963, a pair of researchers named Robert Rosenthal and Kermit Fode assigned a dozen psychology students an experiment: Train rats to solve their way out of a maze. Rosenthal and Fode told half the students that they would be training ‘maze bright’ rats, selectively bred for their exceptional maze-running prowess, and the other half that they had on their hands ‘maze dull’ ones, bred for the opposite trait. Five days in, the ‘maze bright’ rats could complete their task twice as fast as the competing group, which is what you might expect when you pit uber-rats against dimwits.

But here’s the thing: All the rats in the study were, in truth, pretty much the same.

EXPECTANCY EFFECTS

What happened in Rosenthal and Fode’s experiment demonstrates a principle of social psychology that has been confirmed by thousands of studies since:

That an experimenter’s bias can unconsciously influence the performance of their subjects through what are known as ‘expectancy effects’. Here, the students’ belief about their rats dictated how they behaved with them, driving the ones they saw as extra-capable toward success and unconsciously guaranteeing that the ones they expected to be inferior would fail.

Research into expectancy effects over the past several decades has shown that the principle holds true outside laboratory settings, too, and has broad implications for how managers can improve — or damage — the performance of their employees, simply through the power of their own beliefs. In short, what you think about the people you manage may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.