The pygmalion effect or the self-fulfilling prophecies

“ If a manager is convinced that the people in her/his group are first-rate, they’ll reliably outperform a group whose manager believes the reverse—even if the innate talent of the two groups is similar”

Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved. 

In psychology, the Pygmalion effect, also called the Rosenthal effect, “was first demonstrated in a study in 1968 by Robert Rosenthal, a pioneer of behavioral science, along with Lenore Jacobson, a principal of an elementary school. They wanted to examine whether teacher’s expectations of their students impacted their scholastic performance. 

Eosenthal and Jacobson gave students an IQ test at the beginning of the school year. The teachers of these students were told that the test was being administered to predict which students would intellectually bloom over the year. Rosenthal and Jacobson then actually chose students at random and told their teachers that they had performed exceptionally well on the test, despite their actual results giving no indication that they would be intellectual bloomers.

At the end of the study, students were given the same IQ test. While all students performed better the second time, Rosenthal and Jacobson found that those students who had been labelled intellectual bloomers had improved to a greater degree than the other students. 

From these results, they concluded that a teacher expecting enhanced performance from students can actually lead to enhanced performance.”

In management, this invites us to check our own bias towards our team, to question whether our expectations are high enough for them to express their full potential. It should also encourage us to question many of the performance systems which label a rating to individuals and wonder if how those could become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Source : 

https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/the-pygmalion-effect/

https://hbr.org/2003/01/pygmalion-in-management