Shane Gillis, workplace incivility and creativity
My career spans organisational behaviour - and stand-up comedy — so I have thoughts on the Shane Gillis SNL monologue.
From a comedy perspective - the set was weak, to put it mildly. The fact that he had to explain the monologue was over, in lieu of a punchline doing that work, was a clear indicator of that.
From an organisational behaviour perspective - which shockingly isn’t part of the public discourse, what I found interesting were the facial expressions of the band members behind Shane. There was a cringing discomfort there that I haven’t seen since my open mic days.
The SNL band watching Shane Gillis in action
In 2009 researchers published a paper titled "Overlooked but not untouched", which looked at the impact of observing incivility. They ran experiments with university students to find out what happens to people who watch someone else being treated badly.
In the first study the experimenter was rude to a student who turned up late, and in the second study the rudeness came from one student towards another, so the researchers could see whether it mattered if the rude person had power or was just a peer.
Everyone then did a couple of tasks, including solving anagrams and that classic creativity exercise where you list as many uses for a brick as you can in five minutes.
The students who had witnessed the rudeness solved 17-19% fewer anagrams and came up with fewer uses for the brick, the ones from people who had seen rudeness were judged less creative as well.
The impact of rudeness on helpfulness:
Observers of rudeness became noticeably less helpful, because in the first study only 26.5% of the people who had watched the rudeness volunteered to help the researcher with an extra task, compared with 50% of the people who had seen nothing unpleasant happen at all.
The researchers found that the explanation was mood — watching someone get snapped at left people feeling worse, and that bad feeling was enough to squeeze the room they had available for thinking well and acting generously.
What I like about this study is that it puts a number on something we already feel in our bones, which is that one person's bad behaviour in a workplace impacts the experience and cognitive performance of those around them.
In the Shane Gillis clip - you can see the discomfort of the band, and you can hear the discomfort of at least some of the audience. I can’t obviously say how the team at SNL are impacted by the event — but there’s a good lesson for workplaces nonetheless.
Rudeness sends ripples - and if you’re looking to create a creative culture - tolerating incivility is a sure way to undermine your efforts.
Reference: Porath, C. L., & Erez, A. (2009). Overlooked but not untouched: How rudeness reduces onlookers' performance on routine and creative tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(1), 29–44.