Kept and Broken Promises

Last week, BloombergBusinessweek published, "Nobody Cares How Awesome You Are at Your Job" (Suddath, 2014), a summary of an academic study by Ayelet Gneezy (UCAL) and Nicholas Epley (University of Chicago, my alma mater). Don't take that headline to mean that your efforts are worthless or that you can spend the next week playing Candy Crush or updating Facebook.

The original study, "Worth Keeping but Not Exceeding: Assymetrical Consequences of Keeping versus Breaking Promises" (Gneezy & Epley, 2014) tracks the impact of the effort made in the fulfillment of commitments made to others. Their work suggests that, if you fail to follow through with a promise, the recipient of that promise will view your effort negatively, suspect you were insincere in making a promise, and be unhappy with the situation. If you meet a promise with exceptional effort, it is virtually the same as keeping a promise without making that effort.



Let's imagine that you promise your supervisor you will have a draft of a marketing plan to her by Friday afternoon. Failing to make that promise represents -15 effort. Keeping the promise is 0 effort, and exceding efforts to complete the promise is +15. You will be judged harshly for a -15 effort, but about the same for a 0 and +15 effort. (However, if there is no explicit promise, you will be seen more favorably for the +15 effort.)

This might be counterintuitive. You might think that -15 effort would engender negative perceptions, 0 neutral perceptions, and +15 positive perceptions. The authors suggest that promise recipients do not value extra effort because of social norms designed to maintain cooperation for the good of the community.

Gneezy and Epley's paper consists of three studies, one in which participants recall promises, one in which they respond to scenarios, and one in which they are working with a partner making actual promises. This increases the validity of the study, but all participants are undergraduates, so the results may not generalize to other settings. At the same time, the results are strong enough to merit reflection.

What does this mean to you? Most importantly, if you make a commitment at work, you should complete it according to the expectations agreed upon by you and the recipient. If you cannot fulfill your commitment, you should express that as soon as possible and renegotiate. If you know you cannot follow through on a particular promise, don't make it. At the same time, you should think carefully before expending resources to exceed a promise recipient's motivations. Of course, you should think about your particular job, organizational culture, and supervisor to ensure your are meeting the norms of your company.

TerraCycle Staff, Garbage Moguls, NatGeo

When I first read the BloombergBusinessWeek article, I immediately thought of one of my favorite scenes in Garbage Moguls. Lee and Dara Rackley of TerraCycle's graphic design department are charged with finding 250 used and discarded car seatbelts for use producing a new messenger bag. The sisters find it difficult to procure the needed material, but after some false starts and lots of cold calls finally identify a source. When the needed belts arrive at TerraCycle office, Lee (I think) brings them to Tom Szaky, CEO, and asks, "Aren't you proud?" Tom replies, "Uh, no, I'm glad you did your job." What the sisters thought of as a Herculean effort deserving of praise, Szaky found was a simple fulfillment of the promise made when the sisters were assigned the task.

Remember to consider your available resources (time, skills, energy, materials) and reflect thoughtfully before making commitments, and you should be fine at work and at home.