Politics are a common presence in most workplaces, but these relationships don’t emerge equally.  New research from Harvard Business School highlights how schmoozing with your boss tends to be far more effective for male employees than it is for female employees.  Indeed, the research suggests that this may account for roughly a third of the gender gap in terms of promotions.

Workforce data reveals that women earn around 81 cents for every dollar earned by a man, with diminishing numbers of women at each layer of seniority in an organization, up to just 5% of female CEOs.

“The improvement over the last several decades has been agonizingly slow,” the researchers say. “Not only is this unfair, it is inefficient; the economy is missing out on women who would make great managers.”

Male bonds

The research found that male employees tend to do especially well when working under male managers, with male workers earning around 13% more when they work with a male boss than when they have a female boss.  For female workers, their career progression remained the same regardless of the gender of their boss.

The gender relationship matters, as the paper reveals that male workers were not more productive than their female colleagues, nor did they work longer hours.

The data suggests that these gains don’t emerge immediately, however, which the researchers believes rules out blatant discrimination.  Instead, the advantages for male employees emerged over time, which suggests the male bonds were a bigger factor.

This was reflected in the depth of relationship between male workers and their male bosses.  When male workers moved from having a female boss to a male boss, they were 23% more likely to take breaks with them, and had a greater understanding of things like their favorite sports team.

Equal workplaces

Data does suggest that many women feel excluded from various aspects of working life, and especially when it comes to access to managers.  So how can organizations break the self-perpetuating cycle?

A good start would be to ensure that promotions are based more on objective data than on managerial preferences.  Favoritism may also be overcome by ensuring promotional decisions are made by a group of managers rather than individuals.

Organizations might also consider ensuring that events where managers may mingle with employees are deliberately gender-neutral so as not to exclude large portions of the workforce from participating.

“Just being aware of this issue is step one for both employees and organizations,” the researchers conclude.

Effective schmoozing

If you are interested in schmoozing more effectively, however, a 2010 paper from Kellogg Business School might help.  It identified seven core methods used to schmooze our way to the top:

• The Flattery as Advice Schmooze: Occurs when a person poses a question seeking advice as a way to flatter the subject (i.e. “How were you able to close that deal so successfully?”).
• The False Argument Schmooze: Instead of agreeing immediately, a person will yield before accepting his/her manager’s opinion (i.e. “At first, I didn’t see your point but it makes total sense now. You’ve convinced me.”).
• The Social Schmooze: Praising manager to his/her friends or social network with hopes that word gets back to manager.
• The Bashful Schmooze: Positioning a remark as likely to be embarrassing (i.e. “I don’t want to embarrass you but your presentation was really top-notch. Better than most I’ve seen.”).
• The Conformity Schmooze: Expressing values or morals which are held by one’s manager (i.e. “I’m the same way. I believe we should increase minimum wage.”).
• The Social Conformity Schmooze: Covertly learning of manager’s opinion(s) from his/her contacts, and then conforming with opinion(s) in conversations with manager.
• The Similarity Schmooze: Mentioning an affiliation, such as a religious organization or political party, shared by both individuals. (i.e. “I watched the Republican National Convention last night. The keynote presented some great points.”).

For those of us who aren’t keen on sucking up, the whole affair can appear massively fake and disingenuous, but a recent study in the Academy of Management Journal suggests that schmoozers may actually kid themselves in order to go about their work.

Authenticity is key

The study suggests that the best schoomzers aren’t actually faking it at all, because they put an awful lot of effort into actually believing the things they’re about to say, hence they come across more convincingly.

The researchers tracked directors in a number of large American companies.  Each of the participants had a meeting scheduled with another director who had something they needed.  What’s more, each of the meetings took place before an impending board nomination process so there was also the prospect of a promotion to the board.

On the basis that acting is kinda hard (and easier to spot), the researchers hypothesized that people would try to make things as natural as possible.

One way of doing this, for instance, might be for participants to emphasize just how much in common they and their ‘target’ have.  The belief here is that when we see things in common, we’re more likely to ascribe their successes to internal rather than external factors.

Whether this is sufficient to help overcome the gender-based basis for schmoozing with a male boss is hard to say, but it might help female workers get by in a world that isn’t stacked in their favor.