The Pygmalion Effect By Ryan Scholz At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

The following is an excerpt from my first book, Engaging The Work Force, which will be published later this year.

In My Fair Lady, the movie adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, linguistics professor Henry Higgins transforms a common flower girl into a “lady” by coaching her in proper dialect and etiquette. When she succeeds in fooling their aristocratic friends, Professor Higgins and his accomplice, Colonel Pickering, celebrate their accomplishment and fail to acknowledge Eliza’s role in the transformation.

Upset, she rushes to see Freddy Eynsford-Hill, a man she met at the Ascot Races. Then Eliza says to Freddy:

..."You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will."

The Pygmalion Effect has been used to describe the results of studies that demonstrate that a student’s intellectual development is directly related to the teachers’ expect and how they are communicated. In their landmark 1968 publication, “Pygmalion In The Classroom,” Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson document a study conducted in a San Francisco elementary school. The teachers were told that some of their students had tested highly for intellectual growth potential. In fact, the students were chosen at random.

At the end of the experiment, these randomly selected students outperformed students with similar abilities. The study concluded that the teachers’ inflated expectations directly impacted their expectations of these students, which ultimately resulted in higher performance.

Before an organization can develop a highly engaged workplace, it first must believe that it can be one. When asked to sum up his fifty years of work in the field, notable psychologist William James said, “people tend to become what they think about themselves.”

The corollary to this is that people tend to become what we expect of them. In his 1957 work “Social Theory and Social Structure,” Robert Merton pioneered the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy. According to Morton, this phenomenon occurs when “a false definition of the situation evokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true.” Another way of saying this is that once we believe a certain expectation to be true, we act in ways, both consciously and subconsciously, to make that expectation come true.

The self-fulfilling processes is cyclical. We make assumptions about people and situations, which then influence our behavior toward and expectations of them. People then adjust their behavior based on the cues we send them. The result is that the original expectations become true.

Managers who truly believe that their people are capable of great things manage differently from those who think people are incapable. To create an engaged workplace, a manager must have these fundamental beliefs about people:

1. Most people want to do a good job.
2. Most people can be trusted to do the right thing.
3. Most people, given the same information, will reach the same conclusion.
4. People are natural goal setters and achievers.
5. Most people will accept change.

What beliefs do you have that are creating a Pygmalion effect in your organization?

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