Deference is all around you, unfortunately
Animals have evolved many different ways to signal submissiveness to their more powerful counterparts. Lower-ranking chimpanzees might greet a dominant chimp by producing a breathy sound known as a pant-grunt. Hanuman langurs present their hindquarters. Spotted hyenas of both sexes (yes, both) have a habit of displaying erections to acknowledge that they sit lower down the pecking order. Chickens invented the very concept of pecking orders.
The spotted hyena would not survive for long in most organisations. But patterns of deference and dominance are as natural for humans as they are for other animals, and the workplace is no exception. Most companies have org charts that show who outranks whom. Job titles are used to advertise not just what a person does but also where they sit relative to others. Sometimes hierarchies are obvious. In the armed forces, people must salute their superior officers. But deference shows up in other, less explicit ways, too.
Seating arrangements are a good example. Imagine entering a meeting room first. You know that lots of people are going to be sitting around the table, some more senior than you, and that the meeting will be chaired by the chief executive. Your task is to work out where to sit. Chances are that you will not take a seat at the head of the table or midway along either side: these are places where the boss would naturally sit. Somewhere along the sides and towards the end are the safest places to head.
If the CEO is already sitting there when you arrive, your choice now becomes simpler: anywhere but the adjacent chairs. Unless you are very senior yourself, sitting too close to the alpha executive risks being a transgressive act. If someone has an empty chair on either side of them at a boardroom table they either have halitosis or the top job. (Something similar is at work in conference halls: the front rows remain stubbornly empty for a reason.)
Another form of deference has more obvious roots in the animal kingdom. In his book “Mama’s Last Hug”, Frans de Waal, a primatologist and author, describes how monkeys and apes use a teeth-baring grin as a signal of submissiveness to a dominant animal. The office equivalent is observable when the most senior person in the room makes a joke and everyone laughs. Seen from a distance, it might look like the filming of a Netflix special. Inside the room it’s much more likely to be a display of deference than an outbreak of genuine hilarity.
The language of the workplace is also suffused with an awareness of hierarchy and territoriality. People will say things like “this is above my pay grade” to preface conversations where they want to be clear that they are not challenging anyone’s authority even as they explain why things would be so much better if they were running things.
Deferential language is not just used when underlings communicate upwards; it is also a way for peers to signal that they are not going to trample on each other’s turf. A paper published in 2012 by Alison Fragale of the University of North Carolina and her co-authors analysed email communications within organisations for signs of verbal deference – imagine the use of a qualifying phrase like “I’m not 100% sure I agree” to mean “I totally disagree but am not intending to threaten your status.” The authors found that this kind of language was more common between people at similar levels in an organisation than between its junior and senior members.
Hierarchies are useful. They incentivise people to aim higher in their careers, they enable co-ordination and they mean that decisions are taken and then stick. When someone higher up the food chain has the power to promote or sack you, a bit of deference is not just inevitable but also wise. But hierarchies can also cause a lot of damage, by quelling debate, gumming up decision-making and reducing autonomy.
This is why it is worth being alert to quietly submissive workplace behaviours. Their pervasiveness is a reminder to managers that power is always likely to distort interactions – in ways that are subtle as well as obvious, small as well as large. If you hear someone say “that’s above my pay grade”, then your attempts to instil a sense of ownership have a long way to go. If your employees express mild concern about a decision of yours, it is probably best to assume they are really worried about it. And if someone laughs at your jokes, don’t start planning a career in stand-up.
