Have you ever experienced anxiety when someone oversees your work? Here is why!

Let's explore this with one of my recent experiences.

This last Sunday, I went to a restaurant to get a to-go order which I usually do every weekend. This weekend, the packing person has changed. He is a master's student, new to the job, simply working to pay his bills. For his ability & skill set, it is a simple job - nothing complicated. After the order, he took his time and slowly started packing without taking the following order. Everything is going well - slow & steady. Then the manager came to the counter to oversee & make sure the business is running smoothly. The same guy who is relaxed before now started to work fast, running around dropping stuff, taking simultaneous orders & doing messy packing. I can see that this employee is anxious, not so comfortable around the manager. Though he finally managed to pack and get my order ready, it resulted in spoiled food by the time I reached home due to improper packing.

It illustrates that just the idea of someone overseeing your work gets one anxious and commits errors.

 

Have you ever experienced a similar situation?

Yes, it is most likely the answer!

"It is highly typical to feel uncomfortable/anxious when someone is watching you, especially an authority figure,”

According to Dr. Signe A. Dayhoff, a Social Psychologist, Cognitive Behaviorist, and a leading authority on Transforming Social Anxiety into Social Competence

You do not have to be socially anxious to feel like this. We are all programmed to respect people with authority. As a result, we develop a sense of stigma over the risk of getting caught doing something incorrectly or against the authorities' wishes. Also, it is a natural humanistic urge to be approved & liked by others, particularly by someone superior to us (in terms of power, rank, and status) and who assesses performance.

Because we give people in positions of authority more value and power, it can make us believe that anyone in charge has the right to judge our work or us as a whole. Our performance degrades as a result of our thoughts and emotions being in sync with our self-esteem. Rather than concentrating on being as productive as possible, our minds are continuously dissecting everything that happens at work, wondering what it means and how we will screw it up. And now we are unduly concerned about what our supervisor could say. As a result of anticipating unfavorable consequences, we become more anxious and make more mistakes as we become more aware of our actions and strive to prevent making the same mistakes.

 

"This incident is an excellent example of Social Inhibition- a well-studied concept in Social Psychology"

 

It is commonly observed that the mere presence of other people either as an audience or as co-actors can influence our performance on many tasks. Social Inhibition occurs when the performance on a job that's impaired in the presence of others.

Adversely, if there is an improvement in the performance in the presence of others when compared to being alone is known as Social Facilitation. The performance improvement is based on the type of the task and required skills.

Usually, people experience social facilitation when they are familiar with a task or have well-learned skills. The opposite is that Social Inhibition occurs when the performance inferred in the presence of others occurs when one is performing complex or novel tasks.

Why does one experience Social Inhibition?

The Drive Theory of Social Facilitation (Zajonc,1965) brings a unique perspective to the discussion of Social Inhibition. It states that being in the presence of others causes physiological arousal to rise, allowing any dominant response to emerging. The predominant answer will be well-learned in this situation. It suggests that the presence of others will enhance one's performance if they are highly skilled at it or will hinder one's performance if they are not highly trained or performing novel or challenging tasks.

The concept of Evaluation Apprehension, on the other hand, states that an individual's performance is influenced by their concerns of being judged by the audience. According to Cottrell (1968), the fear of being judged is more significant than the presence of other individuals. As the approval and disapproval we received are frequently based on other's evaluations, the presence of others activates our assessment anxiety, which impacts our performance.

According to the Distraction Conflict perspective (Barron,1986), social facilitation/inhibition happens because of a conflict faced by the performer to pay attention to other people (audience) and the task at hand. Cognitive overload might occur as a result of this divided attention. As a result of cognitive overload, people tend to focus on only one thing at a time, which inhibits performance.

A variety of studies and tests are done better to understand social facilitation/inhibition and its causes. Hazel Markus (1978) used a simple activity (putting on and tying shoelaces) and an unknown and more difficult job to examine social promotion and social inhibition (putting on and tying the laboratory robe from behind).

Participants are instructed to complete these two activities in one of three social situations:

(a) alone,

(b) present with a confederate looking, or

(c) with someone repairing a piece of equipment in the corner of the room without watching.

Markus discovered that the more complex work is typically done at a slower pace. She also found an interacting effect: when confederates were present, individuals completed easy tasks faster, but more complex ones took longer.

Furthermore, whether the other person was paying attention to the performance or was engaged in another job in the room, the presence of another person affected performance, these findings show that working with others can either improve or impede performance; students in the passive presence of another person reduced the number of body movements, hand motions, and paralinguistic sounds, according to a study conducted in the United States and Australia. Both laboratory research and a field trial have confirmed this finding. The effect did not change as the experiment became more severe, but it vanished when the person in the room could not see the participant. (Guerin, 1988)

 

How this can be tackled both from the Leadership & from the employee standpoint?

To start with the manager's behavior, the manager was not rude or dictatorial and created no evident circumstance to make the employee feel uneasy or nervous. The reason for watching his employees work is merely inspecting his customer service skills and making sure that the business is performing well. Isn't it simple? But the point is that his mere presence was enough to influence the nature of the employee's work.

Cues that your Employee is anxious or tense at work:

1. Taking more days off than normal
2. Irritation, lacking attention, and decreased productivity
3. Relationships at work are deteriorating
4. Becoming more low-spirited or over-reactive to what others say
5. Starting to act in ways that are out of ordinary
6. Physical reactions such as exaggerated startle reaction, sweating
7. Palpitations, shaking or trembling, shaky voice, tiredness, or fatigue
8. Being hostile, depressed, and anxious most of the time
9. Looking trapped or frustrated

 

As a Manager, the levers you have to help employees feel less anxious at work:

1. Do proper research on your observations before addressing them to employees.
2. Understand the business factors that may cause concern.
3. Maintain realistic work expectations.
4. Give time, advice & essential training to Low-performing employees.
5. Expect off days from everybody dealing with any form of anxiety/ stress.
6. Encourage your employer to add health and wellness programs (yoga or meditation or another kind of exercise) and encourage your employees to use those wellness programs.
7. Encourage physical exercises, meditation, and vacation time.

 

From the Employee standpoint, likely causes of anxiety and stress when the manager began to oversee work:

1. A sudden realization that your work is being observed (shock reaction)
2. Fear of being watched or judged by others, particularly in the presence of others
3. Fear of criticism
4. Fear of being judged (Performance anxiety)
5. A recent warning or bad feedback (Fear of losing a job)
6. Fear of embarrassment or humiliation as a result of his actions
7. Fear that people may notice his nervousness
8. Struggling with anxiety and related concerns; and is thus more likely to feel anxious and stressed in a similar circumstance, with many more possibilities to trace his anxious behavior back to its source.

 

So, in such a situation one should:

1. Separate yourself from fear and anxiety and concentrate on your capabilities & pleasant matters.
2. Reassure yourself that the manager's responsibility is to supervise, ensure the flow is smooth, and not just correct/punish.
3. Pay attention to how your body is reacting, learn to relax and control your nerves.
4. Ask for feedback rather than assuming stuff & piling up, resulting in cognitive overload.

What did NirApad9 find?

To better understand the reasons for anxiety caused by the mere presence of others, we asked our LinkedIn network a fundamental question: have they ever felt anxious when someone oversees their work, and if so, what is/was the cause?

We discovered that

50% of people fear authority/evaluation when given four reasons to choose.

Divided attention affects 22.2 % of people. Self-anxiety affect 22.2 % of people.

In addition, 5.6 % of those polled stated that they had another reason but did not elaborate

 

Our LinkedIn Poll indicates that people frequently experience fear of authority/evaluation even in the mere presence of others. Some people struggle with anxiety, making them more likely to be nervous about working in front of others. Few people have difficulty focusing on the task at hand and the presence of others around them, and their work suffers due to this divided attention.

After all, this, let's return to the Packing guy's story. What makes more sense: heightened physiological arousal leads to the dominating response, the fear of being judged, or cognitive overload owing to divided attention? OR he was having a bad day!! It might be anything or a combination of all of them. But one thing is sure: Other people's presence can influence our behavior, especially when they are our boss!

 

References:

Baron, R. A., Branscombe, N.R. (2011). Social Psychology. USA: Pearson.

Cuncic, A. (2020, November 18). What is Social Facilitation? Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/an-overview-of-social-facilitation-4800890

Dayhoff, S., & Dayhoff, S. (2011, April 28). Fear of Authority Figures in the Workplace Isn’t Just Social Anxiety. EzineArticles. https://ezinearticles.com/?Fear-of-Authority-Figures-in the-Workplace-Isnt Just-Social Anxiety&id=6123777

Guerin, B. (1988, March 2). Social Inhibition of Behavior. The Journal of Social Psychology. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224545.1989.9711723

Madden, B. (2017, April 20). 10 signs your employees might be suffering from stress. Citation. https://www.citation.co.uk/news/hr-and-employment-law/10-signs-employees-might suffering-stress/

Mcleod, S. A. (2011, October 24). Social Facilitation. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/Social-Facilitation.html

Merritt, T. (2018, May 31). Top 5: Ways to help employees with anxiety issues.TechRepublic.https://www.techrepublic.com/article/top-5-ways-to-help-employees-with-anxiety-issues/

Stangor, C. (2014, September 26). Group Performance – Principles of Social Psychology – 1st International Edition. Pressbooks. https://opentextbc.ca/socialpsychology/chapter/group-process-the-pluses-and-minuses-of-working-together/