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.