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City of Seattle
(Kathy is now Director of Planning and Finance for Advocacy and Communications at World Vision.)

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Leadership Eastside

 

Conflict and change: The blog

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18 March 2009

Would you pay someone to agree with you?

“[W]e live in two worlds: one characterized by social exchanges and the other characterized by market exchanges. And we apply different norms to these two kinds of relationships. Moreover, introducing market norms in social exchanges…violates social norms and hurts relationships.”

 

This quote is from Dan Ariely’s book, Predicably Irrational. In the book, he illustrates how we can foul up relationships that are built on friendship and mutual regard by treating them as economic relationships.

 

Influence leadership involves making legitimate use of social norms, like reciprocity and liking. Take reciprocity, for example. In an earlier blog entry, I suggested that in order to be able to influence others, you need to allow yourself to be influenced as well. This is a kind of reciprocity. There are others of course, like the favors you can get from people because you’ve done them favors in the past.

 

All of this stays safely in the realm of social norms, as long as no one offers to pay money. You wouldn’t pay your friends to help you move (economic norm), but you would ply them with beer and pizza afterward (social norm). In fact, they expect it.

 

It would be foolish to try to buy someone’s compliance with a bribe or promise of some kind of economic benefit. It might work, but doing so would permanently convert the relationship (if people aren't too offended) to an economic one—instead of a social one. (Of course, it might even be unethical.)

 

Once that happens, social norms take a backseat to economic norms and you’ll find that you have to start paying for cooperation you used to get for free.

 

This is one reason performance reviews are so tough. Bosses and their employees have a hard time at performance review time talking about pay raises and bonuses, because this requires you to “go economic” in a relationship that’s governed primarily by social norms.

 

Most of the time, the influence leader needs to keep safely in the realm of social norms. One exception is where you can influence someone to do something on the expectation of an economic payoff from someone else, like a promotion from another manager.