The Perils of Dating Your Boss
How a workplace romance with your superior can affect your career prospects.
Psychologists from Australia have found that workplace romances affect our career prospects, but that the consequences are different for men and women.
In one of my favourite sitcoms, The Office, much of the drama comes from witnessing white-collar drone, Tim Canterbury, in his painfully awkward attempts to woo shy receptionist, Dawn Tinsley, who feels unable to respond to his advances because she is already shacked up with a feller who works in the adjoining warehouse (sorry, Jim and Pam: I never bothered with the US version).
Workplace romances are not uncommon. A recent survey suggested that around half of American professionals have been involved in one themselves. After all, if we rub alongside someone for eight hours every day, it shouldn’t be surprising if we end up rubbing alongside them for eight hours every night, too.
But many assume that dalliances with co-workers are freighted with danger. If your relationship turns sour you may be able to kick your former lover out of bed, only to bump into them two hours later at the water cooler.
The risk is surely greater when the relationship is between colleagues of different ranks. When a boss seduces a junior worker, what then? Is the subordinate likely to sleep their way to the top, or find themselves shredded and tossed in the recycling bin like yesterday’s confidential memoranda?
And does it matter if the junior worker is a man or a woman? Do workplace Romeos or Juliets suffer more at their quarterly appraisal meetings?
To find out, Suzanne Chan-Serafin and her very attractive colleagues at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, ran an experiment.
Insurance company roleplay. Yay!
Chan-Serafin had male and female volunteers imagine that they were an executive at a large insurance company, in what sounds like the dullest role-playing game ever. The volunteers were told that it was their job to assess the suitability of a candidate for their company’s managerial training program. The successful (and entirely hypothetical) candidate would be supported through a two year MBA course and then promoted.
Each volunteer was asked to read the resume of one candidate, along with some background information. Volunteers were split into four groups, and each group read a different statement. Some of the volunteers read this statement:
You sit back a moment and think about the evaluation task ahead. You recall meeting Christopher Smith (the candidate) two years ago at an Annual Dinner and since then he has worked on a small project with you. You know Christopher Smith is motivated and gets along well with his colleagues. In recent months, you heard that Christopher has also been getting along well with his current supervisor, Patricia Cummings, a Senior Manager in the California office. In fact, Christopher and Patricia are now in a romantic relationship.
So, these volunteers were led to believe that a male candidate and his female superior were in a relationship. Some of the volunteers read the same statement but with the gendered names reversed, so Christopher became Christine and Patricia, Peter. In that case, it was a female candidate dating her male superior.
The other half of the volunteers read a statement that simply described Patricia as Christopher’s boss (or Peter as Christine’s boss), with no reference to their workplace romance.
All the volunteers were then asked to rate the suitability of the candidate for the prestigious training program.
Results
So did the volunteers treat candidates differently if they were in a workplace romance with their boss? Yes. On a scale of 1 to 6, where 1 equals low suitability and 6 high suitability, the volunteers rated candidates involved in a workplace romance as a 5; candidates not in a workplace romance were scored, on average, 5.3. This is equivalent to a 7.2% increase in rated suitability for candidates not in a workplace romance.
The sex of the candidate was also important, but the result may not be what you expect.
Women were rated as less suitable for the program when they were in a relationship with their boss, but their average scores only fell from 5.3 if they were not in a relationship to 5.2 if they were.
Male candidates fared much worse. Men who were not in a relationship with their boss scored, on average, 5.4 out of 6, and therefore edged out female candidates for the program. But when men were revealed to be sleeping with their boss, their scores dropped to an average of 4.9, a good way below the scores received by female candidates in the same situation.
I don’t know about you, but I would have thought that women would be treated less favourably than men if revealed to be in a relationship with their boss. The woman who sleeps her way to the top, or the male boss who seduces his female secretary, are familiar stereotypes. But there’s no gender-flipped equivalent. Nobody jokes about ambitious young males skipping a few rungs on their ascent of the corporate ladder by hooking up with their female boss. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, just that the common perception is that it’s not an everyday occurrence.
And maybe that’s the point. As Chan-Serafin points out, we may view relationships between junior women and senior men as the norm. When we hear that a woman is dating her boss, we shrug. This could be why female candidates for the hypothetical management program were not rated too differently if they were or were not in a relationship with their boss.
On the other hand, the idea that a junior man might be sleeping with his female boss feels more unusual. The authors of the study say:
There is an expectation that men should be of higher status than women in general and, especially, in a romantic relationship. When men violate such expectations by being in a romantic relationship with their female superiors, their low status information becomes activated in the evaluators’ minds.
In other words, we probably assume that men are high status and treat them accordingly, until we are reminded that they are low status, at which point our evaluation of their ability plummets. If a man is in a relationship with his boss, his status is revealed to be low. This changes how we judge his ability. The same thing doesn’t happen with female candidates, argues Chan-Serafin, because:
For lower status women in an HWR [hierarchical workplace romance], status information is not activated because a romantic relationship with their male supervisors meets status expectations for women and is more prevalent, which produces less stimulus novelty and unexpectedness.
Paradoxically, gendered expectations about women’s role in the workplace may result in sexism toward men. Of course, the fact that women are generally paid less than men for the same work, and experience greater workplace harassment, means that women surely get a rougher deal than men. But when it comes time for their quarterly appraisal, men who have hooked up with their boss are less likely to get ahead.
Chan-Serafin, S., Teo, L., Minbashian, A., Cheng, D., & Wang, L. (in press). The perils of dating your boss: The role of hierarchical workplace romance and sex on evaluators’ career advancement decisions for lower status romance participants. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Read summary
For an audio version of this story, see the 8 March 2016 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
