The Hindu Business Line : We are intensely social animals

You need not wait till the weekend to visit the zoo. Because you may already be spending long hours everyday just there! Yes, we are talking about the workplace.

“Animal analogies have always ranked among the favourite clichés of the business world, where 800-pound gorillas run with the big dogs, swim with the sharks… or end up caught like a deer in the headlights,” writes Richard Connif f in The Ape in the Corner Office ( www.crosswordbookstores.com).

Our time in the workplace is about as natural as a chimpanzee’s in the zoo, he observes. “At some companies, it’s as natural as a hen in a battery cage half pecked to death by some feathered tyrant. The only thing that remains the same is the animal within.” And behaviours at work are ‘rooted millions of years deep in our biology.’

For instance, smiling, ‘our oldest and most natural expression’, is connected to ‘the fear grin in monkeys’ that dates back at least 30 million years. “In a group of macaques, for example, the approach of the alpha may cause a subordinate to cringe and nervously pull back the corners of the mouth, exposing the clenched teeth. It’s a signal meaning, ‘I’m no threat.’”

Similarly, “being nice, even strategically nice, is a natural behaviour of monkeys, apes, investment bankers, and other creatures formerly deemed savage,” says Conniff. While primates do social networking by grooming, humans in the workplace display reciprocal altruism through “friendly conversation and kind words.”

Again, like our ‘ancestors’, we are intensely social animals, with an instinct for affiliation. “The workplace becomes our troop, our tribe, and we start to see the world in us-and-them terms.”

More importantly, for better or worse, “the people around us can influence our blood pressure, our production of biochemicals such as serotonin, dopamine, cortisol, and testosterone, our neural circuitry, even perhaps our ability to reproduce…”

Trust, but check the numbers, advises the author. “By night, chimpanzees huddle together in the treetops. By day, they engage in mutual grooming. But they also watch one another continually and protest unfair dealings with raucous barks of ‘Waaa!’” So too, even when you trust people, “stay alert for people who regard the personal connection primarily as a means for getting close enough to pick your pocket.”

A read that can’t wait till the week-end.

D. Murali

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com