Sucking Up To Your Boss
No one can deny that ingratiation is ubiquitous in the workplace. This behavior is often goes by many names — kissing up the boss’s ass, sucking up to the boss, ass licking, brown-nosing. In fact, Employees are often dependent upon supervisors for promotions, compensation, appraisal, and job assignments. It’s no surprise that they do malpractice in terms of sucking up to the boss and ass kissing behaviors.
Fourteenth — century poet Dante Alighieri hated suck ups so much that he damned them to one of the deeper rings of hell in his famous poem, Inferno. According to American Psychological Association, ingratiation targets often enjoy the flattery and form positive opinions about the person offering it. However, third party observers — such as co-workers — tend to dislike the behavior.
Anthony Klotz and Lawrence Houston at Oregon state University reveals that every suck up is faced with a big challenge called the “ingratiators dilemma” that people with position of power are more likely to perceive your attempts as self serving and duplication.
In my experience, working in the business of human liberation and as an academician, the incompetent/insecure managers, who lack competence, creative capability, and self-efficacy take ingratiation in a positive way and in turn inflate the appraisal of their direct reports while on the other hand of the spectrum, the stellar managers may sense that employees are doing it for some agentic reasons.
In a corporate context, ingratiation or sucking up to the boss takes place in terms of different phrases like “that’s a great idea”, “you are always right”, “lovely tie you wearing” and so forth. In fact, these behaviors could also be viewed as “inability to say No to your boss”, “no guts to speak truth”, “always nodding” (common behavior in board meetings). Furthermore, kissing up is contingent on your boss’s likes and dislikes or his values within the organization. For instance, if a manager likes a particular employee who only follow the compliance or being obedient with him/her and incapable to do task performance or lack strategic agility is likely to be rewarded. As a matter of fact, one of my former colleagues Michael (unreal name) who was a lecturer in a university often involve in administrative tasks since that work was always liked by his manager (although teaching is always evaluated on the basis of subject knowledge, consultancy projects, acquisition of certifications, and research potential) regardless of his skills.
To put it in a nut shell, the results of different studies reveal that an unskilled manager embrace these behaviors as relevant within the organizational context which in turn enhances the workplace deviance. Consequently, it could be concluded that ingratiation rarely stands alone and rather a gambit in a complex which can aggravate the manager and organization’s reputation.
