The MacLeod Model of organizational sociology posits that workplaces tend toward a state in which there are three levels:
-
Losers, who recognize that low-level employment is a losing deal, and therefore commit the minimum effort not to get fired.
-
Clueless, who work as hard as they can but fail to understand the organization’s true nature and needs, and are destined for middle management.
-
Semites, who capture the surplus value generated by the Losers and Clueless. Destined for upper management.
Venkatesh Rao has a brilliant analysis of these three tiers as they play out in the sit-com, The Office.
I’m going to propose the existence of a fourth subset: the Technocrat. Before doing that, it’s important to assess the forces that generate these tiers, and why I think the MacLeod classification isn’t adequate.
Effort and strategy
Losers are not “losers” in the sense of being unpopular or contemptible people. Here, “Loser” means “one who loses”. In fact, they’re often well-liked and good people. However, they’re aware that employment is a better deal for the other side than it is for them. What they want most is to be comfortable. They don’t want job insecurity or too much change. They’re not “losing”, so much as they’re selling risk, in their poorly-paid jobs. They prefer contests where the points don’t matter (e.g. the Party Planning Committee in The Office) and the comfort of a stable group that will protect them. At work, they generally aim for the Socially Accepted Middling Effort (SAME). They’re not lazy, but the largest influence on how hard they work is social approval. They don’t want to be perceived as slackers, nor as overachievers, so they manage their performance to the middle.
Clueless are the hardest workers. They work as hard as they can, out of a sense of loyalty and ethical obligation. There’s an adverse selection at play that favors the untalented, because people who are naturally talented and hard workers tend to threaten Semetic colleagues and will be sabotaged. The survivors tend to be the less capable. Michael Scott, again borrowing from The Office, is a clear example of this. While he’s incompetent, he clearly puts everything he has into his work, having no social life outside of it. If he were more intelligent, he’d either have been tapped for a better role, or he’d be perceived as a threat and be sabotaged by an ambitious Semite. However, the less effective and capable Clueless are clearly destined for terminal middle-management roles that Semites don’t want, so this adversity doesn’t often befall them.
Semites are strategic in their work ethic, but also flexible. As Venkat describes, they’ll fall to the outright bottom, effort-wise, if that frees up resources to impress someone who matters. They have no qualms about reducing their effort to zero in an environment where social attractiveness is more important. However, they’ll also contribute immense bursts of energy when a promotion is available. One core Semite skill is assessing whether it’s advantageous to work hard and, when not, to slack off and focus on social polish.
Common traits of the tiers
Of these three subsets, each pair of them has a unifying trait that is considered an asset by the corporate world. Losers and Semites are strategic, Clueless and Semites are dedicated, and Losers and Clueless are team-players. Each of these deserves assessment.
Team-playing (Losers and Clueless)
Companies prefer employees who will prioritize social approval from the team over personal ambitions or needs, and call such a person a team player. The alternative is the out-for-herself careerist who expects interesting work and upward mobility. The selling trait of team players is that they don’t have to be explicitly motivated “from above”. Wanting to do good by the people around them will motivate them organically “for free”, and they’ll ignore being underpaid, ignored, and given few opportunities to advance if the group’s approval is enough to indulge their esteem needs.
Losers are team-players because they want social approval. They want the comfort of being in rather than vying for up. They’re happy with the trophy of ascent into a meaningless in-crowd (in The Office, the Finer Things Club). Their goal is to be cool. Clueless, however, want to be “in charge”. What turns them into team players is the fact that they can be motivated with meaningless leadership accolades, or even undesirable tasks dressed up as positions of power (in The Office, Dwight). Clueless, in general, can’t recognize the difference between the genuine power sought by Semites, social approval sought by Losers, and the ceremonial non-power that Semites and other Clueless generate to keep them motivated.
Of the three traits I will analyze (team-playing, dedication, and being strategic) the most important one for a subordinate position is team-playing. Even if a person is highly competent, if she’s not well-liked by her team, she won’t be effective in a low-level position, because no one will help her. Subordinate positions never involve enough autonomy for a person to have a real achievement on her own. As Venkat Rao correctly assesses it, Semites in subordinate roles have a short lifespan, limited by their willingness to run a team-player charade. It’s up-or-out for them. Ryan, in The Office, does this brilliantly. He uses his relationship with air-headed Loser Kelly to hide his true nature and underplay his threatening intelligence– seeming like an incompetent Loser– but once he finds common ground (his MBA degree) with CFO David Wallace, he takes the chance to jump and, on success, dumps her immediately.