Handling male egos

Jappreet Sethi

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The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology after a research study in 2013, found that men don’t feel great about themselves, when their wives or girlfriends get successful, with their self-esteem dipping rather than feeling happy about their partners accomplishments. This research found evidence that men automatically interpret a partner’s success as their own failure, even when they're not in direct competition.

It’s bitter truth and most men don’t acknowledge it. This phenomenon carries on to the workplace too, which is still a man’s playground.

At the workplace there is underlying feeling of exasperation in females, around the way male ego is expressed in the workplace. Men may differ significantly in the degree of potential amount of ego build up in them — due to various environmental, genetic, and developmental factors that create different tensions or anxieties, but all of them have egos to protect. Researchers opine that basic desires and fears fuel ego, particularly the desire to succeed and the fear of failing.

For many women the most common ways of handling male ego is to be docile and saying ‘yes’ to all the demands, thereby submitting to the male supremacy or stroking the sense of caregiver and Omni-powerful male. Here are other ways to deal with the male ego at the workplace:

Don’t ignore the value framework

Find out what’s the most important value for your male colleagues, it could be creativity, teamwork, participative decision, equity, justice or relationships with friends and family. Then spend a few minutes thinking how your decision affects their personal values. Any decision or thoughts being proposed by you, that will contrast their personal value system will trigger negative male ego.

Help them see the bigger picture

In order to help people cope with your decision, its better to help them think about the bigger picture, they are likely to exercise self-control even if the decision may not be in their short term interest. By helping them see the bigger picture you and avoid the negative male from being triggered.

Its recommended that you work on this in advance, before you make a new recommendation, write down all the big-picture reasons as to why your recommendation is important to the organisation. Share the rationale so that you can link your recommendations to the survival and betterment of the company. We are wired for survival, by showing the link to survival, you will reduce the chances of negative male ego being triggered.

Stay away from those with low self-esteem

There are somethings which you can solve and others need to be left the way it is. When you are dealing with a male colleague with low self-esteem, chances of triggering negative male ego are high.

Chronically low self-esteem males are highly engrossed in the race to survive, they have not developed a reservoir of emotional capacity to respond effectively when confronted with high degree of anxiety or threat at workplace. The best way to deal with it is not to deal with it, avoid running your decisions through them, as you will hit a wall. If you don’t have an option, approach your HR manager to help the individual cope with workplace changes.

— The writer is an HR & Strategy consultant and writes at www.humanresourcesblog.in