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Leaders hold people up as examples all the time. In team meetings, managers thank the analyst who stayed until midnight to finish a client deck. Chief executives send company-wide emails calling frontline staff heroes, and many companies run recognition apps that post every thank-you to a feed the whole office can scroll. Each of those leaders wants everyone else to see what good work looks like and to try to match it.
Instacart held up its entire workforce as an example in 2020. With grocery orders pouring in during the early months of the pandemic, the company ran a "Household Heroes" campaign to recruit 300,000 more people to buy and deliver groceries for its customers, complete with social media ads that hailed them as heroes. A team led by Wharton's Lindsey Cameron interviewed some of those workers that summer and again six months later, and found that they reacted to the campaign in very different ways. Some felt their ordinary shifts already made them heroes and saw no reason to go further out of their way for customers.
Few leaders expect their employees to do less after hearing praise. Yet once people believe they've already done something remarkable, they have little reason to keep proving it. Most leaders never notice those employees easing off.
Employees judge praise by what comes with it
Many of Instacart's workers compared the company's praise with their paychecks and found it hard to take seriously. They saw Instacart as manipulative for calling them heroes without paying them better. Most of them needed the money too badly to quit. They kept working for the company and did the job reluctantly.
Other workers believed every word of the campaign. To them, showing up for a regular shift during a pandemic was already something noble. They liked being called heroes and thought well of Instacart, but none of them were still on the job a year later. A leader can't tell from an employee's smile whether that person plans to stay.
The largest group of workers fell somewhere in between. They felt uneasy comparing grocery runs to what doctors and nurses were doing. Many of them went beyond the job to prove they deserved the hero label. Some kept a stash of toilet paper for customers who couldn't find any, and others drove to a second store for items the first one didn't have. Their view of Instacart soured as tips shrank and orders got harder to win. As the pandemic eased, many of them moved to other apps where they could build a list of regular customers.
Praise costs a leader nothing to give. But employees notice whether more money, a lighter workload, or better treatment ever follows a manager's kind words. When a boss calls people heroes but doesn't raise their pay, the employees with the least money to spare stop believing a word of it. Others take it as proof they've already done enough.
Praising one person changes how coworkers behave
A campaign like Instacart's flatters a whole workforce at once. Most praise inside a company goes to one person at a time, in front of everyone else. Every coworker in the room then measures themselves against the person being praised. Some of them use the comparison to get better at their own jobs. Others resent that person and start working against them.
Two Shanghai University researchers found both reactions in a survey of temporary agency workers. The temps spent their days next to better-paid permanent staff. Some of them felt they could handle their jobs well, and they tended to learn new skills on the job. The rest were less sure of themselves. They more often resented the permanent staff and admitted to giving coworkers the silent treatment.
If people believe they can do their own job well, they tend to see a coworker the boss just thanked as someone they could catch. They try to learn what that coworker knows. Anyone stretched thin sees the same coworker as out of reach. Since they don't expect to catch up, they try to pull that coworker back instead. According to the Shanghai researchers, this kind of sabotage happens out of sight and is hard for anyone in charge to detect.
Leaders can help everyone else on the team believe they could do the same work as the person they just thanked. The Shanghai researchers recommend telling employees exactly what earned the praise and what someone else would have to do to receive it. They also suggest picking someone to recognize from each group of employees with similar experience. Each employee then measures themselves against someone at their own level. Workers feel more up to the job when their manager says plainly what's expected and trains them for it.