… Aside from annoying your coworkers
Employees may get a career boost from flattering and always agreeing with their supervisor — however, new research found it can also prompt workers to behave badly.
The study, conducted by academics from universities in the U.S., Singapore and China, examined how 75 professionals used self-promotion in the workplace, such as taking credit for success, boasting about performance and highlighting connections to other important people, and how employees used ingratiation tactics — also referred to as flattering the boss.
Researchers found the more employees flatter their supervisor, the more they deplete their self-control resources for that day, making them less energized and more likely to engage in workplace deviance, such as incivility to a co-worker, skipping a meeting or surfing the internet at work.
However, unlike ingratiation tactics, acts of self-promotion in the workplace did not appear to inspire workplace deviance.
For more on what employees who flatter their supervisor may experience at work, view this press release from Oregon State University’s College of Business, one of the schools to co-author the Journal of Applied Psychology article about the research.