Pygmalion Effect

A friend of mine who is a delivery unit head of a reputed IT organization was relating an interesting experience from his workplace. As a delivery unit head he mandated that each of his project team absorbs at least 4 campus recruits. He observed that the freshers allocated to one project manager always excelled and became quickly productive and billable compared to other projects. This happened repeatedly for couple of years.

My friend who is always in the lookout for such signals soon found out that the Project Manager in question always expected enhanced performance from the new college recruits rather than brand them as ‘Freshers’ who will take their time to learn. So why did this make them perform better?

According to Behavioral psychologists, greater the expectation placed upon people, better they perform. The effect is named after Pygmalion. Pygmalion is a self fulfilling prophecy. In this case, the Project Manager’s expectation was internalized by the new recruits and it reflected in their performance. In many cases, the new recruits are labeled as “non-billable resources” or “buffer resources” and leads to poor expectations and thereby poorer performance.