What Are The Causes Of Dysfunctional Self-demand At Work?

Self-demand is something fundamental in any field. It is necessary to be a little demanding with yourself if you want to grow as a person, both at work and in any important area of ​​our lives.

However, everything has a limit. It is one thing to be self-demanding in the sense of being responsible, constant and making an effort to achieve what one sets out to do, and another, very different thing, is to be obsessively perfectionist, asking for more than one can and making our work performance something that determines our satisfaction and self-esteem.

Maladaptive perfectionism, whether at work or anywhere else, is harmful to our health, as well as unproductive.. Let’s see what are the causes of dysfunctional self-demand at work and its consequences.

The main causes of dysfunctional self-demand in the workplace

In the working world, a culture has been established in which the idea that seeking perfection is an admirable trait is very often held. From the highest positions to the most subordinate employees, many workers impose increasingly higher standards on themselves in an attempt to achieve success. Many associate being a perfectionist and more scrupulous with having more good results. Nevertheless, To what extent does the pursuit of perfection in the workplace do more harm than good?

Self-demand and perfectionism are well considered in our meritocratic society, especially at work. When we talk about a demanding worker, we imagine an individual who is constant, willful, persistent in his goals and who often succeeds.

This self-demand is adaptive and functional when it responds to our capabilities, knowledge and adjusts to the context.. Making an effort at work to be more efficient and productive, as long as it does not cause us discomfort and gives good results, is desirable.

While doing everything possible to improve in the workplace is not inherently bad, scientific research suggests that perfectionism could have a dark side and that it could harm the individual who exhibits it. This excess of perfectionism would negatively affect the worker’s job performance. This trait has been called “negative perfectionism,” “maladaptive perfectionism,” or even “neurotic perfectionism.” Here we are going to call it “dysfunctional self-demand.”

If being too perfectionist in the workplace brings problems and, furthermore, results in worse performance, means that our self-demand is clearly dysfunctional. An individual has high self-demand when:

This negative perfectionism causes the person to raise the bar higher and higher., wanting to do their job or tasks as close to perfection as possible, but having no control over it. Due to this, dysfunctional self-demand can be a great detriment to the subject’s mental and physical health, in addition to also translating into worse work performance.

The origins of dysfunctional self-demand at work

Being a multidimensional characteristic of our personality, self-demand can have diverse origins depending on its degree and particular experiences in our personal life.

An important influencing factor on the degree of work self-demand shown in adulthood is the environment in which we have grown up. Perfectionism can be learned, having origins both in cultural norms within a society and in the parenting styles that we have been subjected to in our childhood.

One of the possible causes, very recurrent, is having had a childhood marked by the high standards of parents towards different aspects, mainly academic performance. For example, if our parents valued our academic qualifications excessively or were too strict with how we managed our study and leisure time, this will have conditioned us to have, in adulthood, an obsessive desire to meet work goals and perform as much as possible.

Relationships have been established between having been subject to a strict and harsh parenting style and reaching adulthood with excessive perfectionist tendencies. It is common for people who have grown up in such strict environments to reach adulthood fearing that if they do not do things perfectly something bad will happen, in addition to feeling feelings of shame and guilt.

Dysfunctional self-demand too It may be a product of our personal experience with the work. It may be linked to the fact that, at some point when we feel that we could have done better, we become obsessed with never doing things as “badly” as we thought we did in the past. Because of this experience, lived in an almost traumatic way, one tries harder and harder, setting the bar higher and higher and perceiving one’s own poor work performance as synonymous with failure, laziness and lack of effort.

And there is also the influence that others have on us. If we know someone who does everything well, who has a very high job performance and sees himself as a successful person, we probably want to imitate him. This will make us compare ourselves to that person and feel that we must demand more of ourselves to reach their level and, thus, be socially validated like them.

The consequences of excessive work self-demand

As we said, dysfunctional self-demand at work can affect a person’s physical and mental health. Having almost obsessive thoughts and behaviors about how tasks should be done is detrimental to the time, energy and health of the person who presents them.

Scientific research confirms this. Maladaptive perfectionism has been associated with higher rates of depressive and anxious symptoms. This may be because perfectionism is often associated with high levels of neuroticism, which is related to high levels of anxiety, stress and burnout, in all types of professions. Stress also causes various physical and physiological symptoms, such as insomnia, gastrointestinal problems, chronic fatigue and muscle tension.

But if that were not enough, dysfunctional perfectionism in the workplace not only harms mental and physical health, but also implies worse job performance. In some cases, this is a direct consequence of anxiety, depression, and burnout syndrome. The inverse relationship also occurs, where symptoms of depression and anxiety arise because one feels that they are not good enough for their job by not accomplishing everything they have set out to do.

Furthermore, high anxiety caused by excessive self-demand can lead us to inaction. Because one sets goals that are unattainable or that require a lot of time and effort to achieve, we end up paralyzed, unable to act due to the fear caused by the possibility of failing. This will cause us, in the end, to miss opportunities or not use our time efficiently, feeding our self-critical voice that tells us that we are worthless and that we constantly fail.

It also happens that dysfunctional self-demand is “contagious”. Having a worker with excessive perfectionism has an impact on the work environment, creating a neurotic atmosphere in the place that will not only affect the performance and functionality of the neurotic worker himself, but will also harm others.

In other words, although it is good to want to improve oneself and achieve a performance as close to perfection as possible, it is also worth mentioning that if this perfectionism becomes dysfunctional it will have consequences for the mental and physical health of the individual, in addition to worse performance, which It is just the opposite of what is desired.