01-08-2025
Workplace Wellbeing: Is there a price to pay for being too likeable?
Fiona Buckley, a 44-year-old executive coach from Dublin, wishes she hadn't worried so much about being likeable.
'When I worked in the corporate sector, thinking about whether or not people liked me, and trying to please them so that they did, was a huge issue for me,' Buckley says.
It had a negative impact on her, personally and professionally. 'I'd focus on other people's needs, instead of my own, which meant I often felt resentful and taken advantage of,' says Buckley.
'I was emotionally burned out, because I wasn't expressing myself authentically. And I don't think people took me seriously. I was so nice that they doubted I'd be able to make the tough decisions required of a leader.'
Buckley is not the only one who feels pressure to be liked. Strong connections with peers were once essential to our survival.
So essential that a 2021 Duke University study found that we are still hardwired to subordinate our own preferences to those of the majority, such that by their third birthday children are going along with what others say or do for the sake of following the crowd.
That finding is true of both boys and girls, but some people argue that the pressure to be liked weighs more heavily on women.
Those people include Amy Kean, a sociologist and CEO of Good Shout, a learning-and-development company in Britain.
'Good Shout provides training in how to use your voice with impact, and, when working with women, we noticed something getting in the way of that impact,' says Kean.
'Women made frequent apologies for having an opinion, softened their speech in a variety of ways, and constantly smiled.'
Amy Kean: "Women made frequent apologies for having an opinion, softened their speech in a variety of ways and constantly smiled.'
Kean wondered why and she commissioned a survey of 1,000 people to find out.
The result is a recently published report, called Shapeshifters: What We Do at work to Be Liked.
In this report, 56% of women said that they felt pressure to be likeable, compared with 36% of men. Women also modified their behaviour accordingly: 50% of them held back their true opinions, 43% downplayed their achievements, and 35% said they smiled more to be liked.
Melrona Kirrane is an associate professor of organisational psychology at Dublin City University and the academic lead of Let's Lead! — a leadership development programme for women.
Kirrane says that there may be a psychological explanation for these findings.
'Psychologists use the 'Big Five' framework to describe personality and it's based on five broad traits: Conscientiousness, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and emotional stability,' Kirrane says.
'Studies have consistently shown there are strong sex differences when it comes to two of these traits. There is a stronger predisposition for women to be agreeable and more men than women are at the higher end of the emotional stability scale.'
What does this mean for human behaviour?
Melrona Kirrane says women's predisposition to agreeableness makes them more likely to think of others and prioritise caring, sharing, compassion and support: 'It makes sense from an evolutionary viewpoint — women have babies and the survival of those babies spends on women looking after others.'
Kirrane outlines how women's predisposition to agreeableness makes them more likely to think of others and to prioritise caring, sharing, compassion, and support.
'It makes sense from an evolutionary viewpoint,' Kirrane says. 'Women have babies and the survival of those babies depends on women looking after others.'
Being more prone to emotional instability pushes women to pay more attention to their likeability.
'In short, they are more likely to get upset if they are not liked, which means they have an extra incentive to behave in more 'likeable' ways,' says Kirrane.
This doesn't apply to all women, and Kirrane says that 'it's simply a general tendency that is reinforced by how we socialise girls and boys and it carries through in to later life and in the workplace'.
Further pressure is put on women when they don't conform to the stereotype and are assertive and strong, instead of likeable and warm. This was demonstrated in a 2003 study that asked two groups of
students at Harvard Business School to evaluate the performance of an entrepreneur.
One group was told that the entrepreneur was called Heidi and the other that he was called Harold.
Both groups judged the entrepreneur to be competent, but there was a stark difference in their assessment of likeability: Heidi was seen as selfish and difficult in a way Harold was not.
Fiona Buckley: 'I was emotionally burned out because I wasn't expressing myself authentically. And I don't think people took me seriously. I was so nice that they doubted I'd be able to make the tough decisions required of a leader.'
This rings true for Buckley. 'If women try to assert themselves, they get negative feedback in a way that men don't,' she says.
'As a woman in the workplace for the past 25 years, I've seen how women are expected to do emotional labour by smoothing over conflicts and managing people's feelings and the repercussions there are if we don't: We're called cold and bitchy.'
Kean isn't surprised that women buckle to this pressure, but she does worry that it's holding them back professionally.
'This constant pressure to smile and bite their tongue, to downplay achievements and regulate how they express their confidence, affects how women are seen at work and the opportunities they are given,' Kean says.
'If we are not our own cheerleaders because we're scared of the repercussions of cheerleading too loudly, there's no doubt we miss out.'
If efforts to seem likeable at work are counterproductive some of us might start to reconsider our behaviour.
Erica Boothby: "We're so aware of our own anxieties and perceived mistakes during conversations and assume these are visible to others and damaging their impression of us. But our conversation partners are usually focused on entirely different things: their own internal struggles for example. They simply don't notice the minor slip-ups we obsess over.'
Erica Boothby, a social psychologist and researcher at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, adds another reason: We underestimate how much others like us.
As a young PhD student, she used to ruminate on conversations and replay moments when she felt she had made a bad impression. But when she discussed these interactions with others, she noticed they didn't see things the way she saw them.
'They would insist the interactions had gone better than I imagined,' she says.
'That made me curious: How could two people perceive the same interaction so differently?'
She set up a study to answer this question, asking strangers to talk to one another and then rate how much they liked each other and how much they thought the other person liked them.
Published in 2018, this study found that people significantly underestimated how much other people liked them.
'We're so aware of our own anxieties and perceived mistakes during conversations and assume these are visible to others and damaging their impression of us,' says Boothby.
'But our conversation partners are usually focused on entirely different things: Their own internal struggles, for example. They simply don't notice the minor slip-ups we obsess over.'
This realisation helped Boothby. 'When I catch myself ruminating after a conversation, I remind myself that, statistically, the other person probably isn't judging me as harshly as I'm judging myself,' she says. 'It makes social interactions much less stressful.'
Buckley has tried to come to a similar level of understanding about her desire to be liked.
'I used to chase the feeling of being liked and if I could have a do-over, I'd focus more on being respected,' she says. 'But I'm an extrovert and friendly by nature.
'My values are all about connection and my inclination is to make sure everyone is OK. Social conditioning and gender stereotypes were layered on top of this to make me someone who worked hard to be liked.'
There were advantages to being this way: Buckley built strong relationships as a result.
'I had a lot of social capital in the workplace and could ask anyone for a favour,' she says.
'Even today, a lot of the contacts I made 20 years ago are still in my network, because I invested so heavily in those relationships.
'But it came at a cost: There were times when I wasn't true to myself.'
What's the solution to this dilemma? Kirrane would like to see attempts being made to address unconscious bias as regards gender stereotypes.
'Leaders have a role to play in this,' she says.
'They set the tone and are role models in the workplace. If they are trained to become aware of the underlying drivers of behaviour that are making men and women feel boxed in in the workplace, they can then try to do something about them.'
Having a strong support network can help women break out of the likeability trap.
Mentors and trusted peers can give them guidance on how to do this.
'There is also a need for women to take a stand on what they are willing to put up with,' says Kirrane.
'If more women were assertive and spoke up, that would eventually become the cultural norm in organisations.'
It would also make the workplace much more dynamic, according to Kean.
'Amazing things happen when good people can express themselves fully and even better things happen when we feel empowered to disagree and speak with honesty,' she says.
'If women were able to do this, the ideas and solutions that would be shared as a result could change the world.'
Buckley believes her life would have been different had she been able to do this when she was younger.
'I've worked on my assertiveness and boundaries over the years and now I know it's OK for someone not to like me, that it's not possible to be everyone's cup of tea,' she says.
'What's more important is that they respect you and your position. I wish I'd given myself permission not to be liked when I was younger. It would have made me feel free to be myself.'
"Workplace leaders set the tone and are role models in the workplace. If they are trained to become aware of the underlying drivers of behaviour that are making men and women feel boxed in in the workplace, they can then try to do something about them" —Melrona Kirrane, associate professor of organisational psychology at DCU.
LIKEABILITY LABOUR
'Smile, it might never happen'. If you're a woman, you've probably had these words directed at you by acquaintances, colleagues or even random strangers at some point in your life. So it shouldn't surprise you to learn that women are expected to do more 'likeability labour' in the workplace.
Likeability labour is what sociologist Amy Kean calls the work people do to be liked. Her organisation, Good Shout, recently published a report delving deeper into this issue.
The main takeaway of 'Shapeshifters: What We Do at Work to Be Liked' is that women do far more likeability labour.
'Being an opinionated, vocal woman isn't always celebrated in the workplace,' says Kean. 'It can result in women being labelled bossy and difficult. That's why so many women choreograph their every move trying to be perceived as likeable.'
They do this by playing office mum: taking notes in meetings, smoothing over conflicts and baking cakes for birthdays. Some 40% also do it by apologising before saying something in order to shield themselves from accusations of arrogance and a third make a conscious effort to smile more.
Would it help if men were held to these same standards? Kean doesn't think so. 'Not everyone is capable of it,' she says. 'Neurodiverse women often communicate in a more direct way as do working class women like me. Expecting everyone to shapeshift is not a solution.'
Associate professor of organisational psychology, Melrona Kirrane, would prefer for everyone to be freed from gender expectations. For women to be empowered to shake off the burden of likeability labour.
'It's frustrating if you're the one who always buys the birthday cards and bakes the cakes,' she says. 'It's not even rewarded as part of your performance evaluation.'
She would also like to see it become acceptable for men to take on these tasks. 'There's pleasure to be gained from spreading the love in the office,' she says. 'Why should it only be women who get to experience that when many men would enjoy it too?'
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