Under Pressure to Be Perfect: How Dehumanizing and Rehumanizing Social Cues Lead to Maladaptive and Adaptive Perfectionism in Professional Ballet
Author Information:
Rachael D. Goodwin, Assistant Professor at the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University.
Lyndon E. Garrett, Assistant Professor of Management at the Melbourne Business School.
Ali P. Block, Clinical Research Coordinator at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Journal:
Academy of Management Journal (2025)
Summary:
In high-performance pressure environments, dehumanizing social cues within the organization (e.g., leaders or coworkers denying workers' physical or emotional human needs) can lead to unhealthy (maladaptive) perfectionism, whereas rehumanizing social cues can encourage employees to shift towards a healthier (adaptive) form of perfectionism.
Research Questions:
1. What are the contextual factors that stimulate the different types of perfectionism?
2. What types of situations are likely to cue perfectionistic behaviors at work?
Note: Our initial interests were questions about relational dynamics and diversity initiatives in the ballet industry, but our interests quickly shifted to perfectionism as discussions around diversity (or the lack thereof) led to dancers describing an intense pressure to look and act a certain way to fit the perfect worker image.
What we Know:
High-pressure environments often employ excessively high standards that may evoke harmful experiences of perfectionism. For instance, elite gymnast Simone Biles withdrew from the 2021 Summer Olympics, citing overwhelming pressure to be perfect. James McDonald, CEO of Rockefeller & Co., an unrelenting perfectionist faced with immense organizational pressure, tragically committed suicide. Perfectionism has been increasing over time, fueling what has been referred to as a perfectionism epidemic. Despite the clear relevance to environments with high performance pressure, the emerging literature on workplace perfectionism has yet to explore the social and environmental conditions likely to trigger perfectionism at work.
The extant literature on perfectionism at work has largely focused on the negative individual and performance outcomes associated with perfectionism. However, perfectionism is not a uniformly harmful experience. There are two forms of perfectionism which have been labeled in various ways, but are commonly referred to as maladaptive and adaptive. Maladaptive perfectionism involves excessively high standards, an obsessive fear of making mistakes, and negative self-beliefs, which negatively affects mental health and well-being,, as well as work performance. Adaptive perfectionism, which has been less explored in the literature, also involves excessively high standards, but without the same fear and obsession over mistakes. Workers experiencing adaptive perfectionism have been shown to experience enhanced performance, resilience, and task focus, with less decline in mental health than maladaptive perfectionism.
Given the important differences in the outcomes of these two types of perfectionism, organizational scholars should be interested in understanding what drives one or the other.
Novel Findings:
Our study provides several novel findings:
1. We are the first to link de/rehumanization to better understand what leads to different types of perfectionism. More specifically, we identify organizational dehumanization and rehumanization as underlying contextual mechanisms separating maladaptive and adaptive perfectionism.
2. We explore how people can shift back and forth between these different types of perfectionism, and the important role the cues in the environment play to support workers shifting from an unhealthy to a healthier form of perfectionism.
3. We also identify specific forms of dehumanizing and rehumanizing social cues, illuminating how people in organizations can ameliorate some common, often subtle, and perhaps unrecognized drivers of organizational dehumanization and maladaptive perfectionism.
4. We offer a cyclical and iterative view of perfectionism, demonstrating how maladaptive and adaptive perfectionism are characterized by cycles of mutually reinforcing cognitions and behaviors.
Note: While we have identified the above findings within the extreme context of professional ballet, we believe our findings transfer to many other high-pressure professions (e.g., doctors, academics, bankers, professional athletes, military personnel, consultants, emergency response personnel) which may knowingly or unknowingly encourage practices eliciting organizational dehumanization and maladaptive perfectionism.
Novel Methodology:
We collected multiple rounds of qualitative (interviews) and quantitative (surveys) to create and support our research model, but the latter was cut during the review process.
Implications for Practice:
We hope this new understanding of an iterative, multi-dimensional perfectionism that is exacerbated by environmental social cues will help inspire and guide practitioners to reduce the harmful effects of maladaptive perfectionism. Current perfectionism interventions focus primarily on changing the individual experiencing the perfectionism, largely neglecting the context in which they are situated. For example, clinicians have demonstrated the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy interventions, and popular social psychology suggests attenuating impression management and embracing authenticity to thwart perfectionism. We applaud this work on person-centered interventions, recognizing that our study similarly points to the potential benefits of helping people embrace humanity and practice self-compassion, in response to the call to support the relationship between common humanity and self-kindness But we also argue that such interventions are likely insufficient, particularly for workers in high performance pressure industries who repeatedly encounter dehumanizing cues. Rather than focusing primarily on training individuals with high performance pressure to manage their own perfectionism, which could prompt an unfair internal burden, or even a breakdown, we hope practitioners will instead use this work to help perfectionists recognize their patterns of shifting from maladaptive to adaptive cycles so that they can identify the internal and environmental factors involved in these shifts.
Our iterative findings challenge long-held assumptions about the nature of perfectionism being primarily trait-like. By adopting the lens of social information processing theory, we contribute to work examining the contextual factors of perfectionism by shedding light on how social cues shape workers’ shifting between the two types of perfectionism. Lacking an understanding of the iterative quality of perfectionism, and how high-pressure workplace environments may cue the different types of perfectionism, leaves high-pressure organizations with a limited understanding of how they may be subtly influencing employees’ perfectionism, or how they can effectively reduce the maladaptive perfectionism cycles that often thrive in these environments. Furthermore, leaders who continue to view perfectionism as predominantly trait-like will likely see little to no reason to take responsibility to address the negative consequences of maladaptive perfectionism.
There are many organizational practices that can and should be utilized to facilitate a healthier form of perfectionism in organizational employees. For example, leaders and employees, particularly those within high performance pressure industries, can be trained to search for signs indicating that others may feel trapped in a cycle of maladaptive perfectionism (e.g., harsh self-criticism, self-harming behaviors), and taught ways to proactively affirm the humanity of those individuals. Our work would suggest this is particularly important for entry-level professionals seeking to prove themselves. Additionally, human resource professionals, mentors, or others involved in the organizational onboarding of newer employees would be wise to ensure that they avoid sending dehumanizing signals. We are not suggesting that the pursuit of excellence be diminished in any organization by following any of these recommendations. Rather, we encourage those mentoring early career professionals within a high-pressure environment to make the changes necessary to model adaptive behaviors and provide a learning environment for their mentees, while still maintaining high quality expectations. Our work suggests that doing so can signal mentees to embrace their own humanity, while simultaneously encouraging them to strive for excellence.
Implications for Policy:
Organizations have an obligation to create policies that can help minimize dehumanization and maladaptive perfectionism in their work environment. As with any cultural or environmental shift in the workplace, mitigating dehumanizing cues in organizations may take years of dedicated effort, especially since these cues can be very subtle (Bain et al. 2009). Some recommendations for organizations based on the factors of organizational dehumanization we identified include: 1) policies encouraging objective and attainable performance metrics that allow room for making and reporting mistakes along the way, leaders sharing (rather than hiding) weakness, training employees to learn from mistakes 2) structuring roles and responsibilities in ways that encourage subordinate agency (e.g., psychological safety, anonymous reporting systems, active listening), 3) policies that prioritize emotional wellbeing, encouraging short but regular breaks, providing resources to help employees embrace subjectivity (e.g., support groups, mentors, mental health services), 4) taking time to collect and provide constructive individual feedback, celebrating individuality by acknowledging unique contributions through employee recognition programs. In sum, we recommend that leaders, or those involved in creating organizational policies, be mindful of how workers in high pressure to perform industries may feel dehumanized even by seemingly small and subtle cues. By doing so, employees at all levels can reduce maladaptive perfectionism in the workplace and promote striving for excellence in a healthier way.
Implications for Society:
The detriments of perfectionism at work and in society have been a recent focus in best-selling books, TED talks, and news articles. We provide a new understanding of the cyclical and iterative nature of perfectionism that we hope will be useful to most competitive industries in society. We believe our findings transfer to many other high-pressure professions (e.g., doctors, academics, bankers, professional athletes, military personnel, consultants, emergency response personnel) which may knowingly or unknowingly encourage practices eliciting organizational dehumanization and maladaptive perfectionism. However, more work is needed to empirically test our model in these other contexts; we acknowledge that the ballet context was well suited for exploring perfectionism in a high performance pressure environment, making it ripe for the discovery of dehumanization as a contextual mechanism, but that our sample has unique characteristics that may raise questions about transferability. For example, professional ballet companies are predominantly female, and 78% of our interviewees were women. This may account for the salience of performance pressure among our participants, given that the ratio of professional ballet dancers seeking jobs to positions available is significantly higher for women than men, so women may feel more pressure as they are treated as more replaceable. In addition, women have traditionally been more likely than men to be denied status, which inhibits their agency. They are also more likely than men to be treated as inhumane sexual objects in society and at work. Indeed, dehumanization was particularly salient among our female participants, although both men and women in our sample were open about the role dehumanizing factors in their environment played in making them feel maladaptively perfectionistic.
Another idiosyncratic feature of our context is the importance of the physical body in ballet. There are few other contexts in which physical perfection and precision are required to such a high degree. Thus, dancers’ experience with perfectionism is more focused on the physical body than would be the case in most other contexts. However, research has increasingly demonstrated the importance of considering the physical body in high-stress work environments, even when the work being done is primarily cognitive.
Implications for Research:
This study opens several avenues for future research. For example, our findings, which support other work examining the link between perfectionism (as a trait) and self-compassion, could suggest that self-compassion may be especially important in high performance pressure environments. However, research on self-compassion as an intervention to diminish shame, depression, and other negative affect tends to ignore the social context. More empirical work is also needed to study self-compassion as a response to environmentally-induced perfectionism. It would also be beneficial to identify which self-compassionate strategies are most effective in response to the various factors of dehumanization. While we theorize that self-compassion helps dancers resist dehumanizing cues, our qualitative findings make it difficult to discern whether dancers develop self-compassionate practices after learning how to resist these cues some other way, or if these practices are part of their resistance to dehumanizing cues.
This work provides opportunities to build upon work already examining how past cultural factors can perpetuate influence on people in the present. More specifically, our work highlights the costs of high-pressure, competitive workplace environments with dehumanizing factors, by showing the toll they take on employee wellbeing. There are other outcomes likely related to our model which were not examined that seem ripe for empirical investigation, including the effect of adaptive perfectionism (vs. maladaptive perfectionism) on employee retention, performance, and the organizational costs and benefits associated with rehumanizing maladaptively perfectionistic employees. There are also likely to be visible and measurable costs of failure in high pressure organizations driven by industry culture. Future work could explore the nature and degree of performance pressure within competitive industries. For example, investigating employees’ tension between time pressure and pressure to be precise on a task; how do employees perform micro-activities with exactness within a short time frame, or how do they continue to be precise over long time periods? Ballet dancers face an impossible task—be perfect in one’s movements, timing, etc., all day long. This question could be examined in various other workplace environments encouraging speed, precision, and constant or continual evaluation of employees.
Lastly, we encourage more research on how leaders and institutions dehumanize workers, and the effects had. In addition to maladaptive perfectionism, dehumanization may promote other maladaptive reactions, such as unethical behavior. Some research shows how performance pressure elicits unethical behavior, which may be a function of dehumanization. However, research linking dehumanization and unethical behavior has focused on the opposite direction, looking at how unethical behavior leads to dehumanization. Our findings suggest that as people come to see themselves as less human, they may detach from the kind of person they want to be, leading to maladaptive behaviors. We encourage exploration of how dehumanization may cause employees to distance themselves from human values (e.g., caring for their bodies, serving others, work-life balance, honesty, etc.), and what causes workers to stay in or commit to dehumanizing environments. Our findings suggest that opposing rehumanizing forces may help sustain worker engagement amid dehumanization, but to what extent does rehumanization fix the problem or just perpetuate the harm of being in a dehumanizing environment?
Abstract:
Research on workplace perfectionism has focused on harmful consequences of workers’ perfectionism. However, perfectionism is not a uniform experience. Maladaptive and adaptive perfectionism have different outcomes on worker performance and well-being. While perfectionism appears especially prevalent in high-performance pressure environments, minimal research has examined how social cues shape workers’ experience of perfectionism. Through an inductive study of professional ballet dancers facing extreme performance pressure, we discovered that social cues influence whether people experience maladaptive or adaptive perfectionism. We found that organizational dehumanizing cues elicited perfectionistic concerns and increased self-destructive behaviors, leading to a vicious cycle of maladaptive perfectionism and an increased likelihood of breakdowns at work. However, rehumanizing cues precipitated a shift towards adaptive perfectionism characterized by perfectionistic strivings and self-compassionate behaviors. We also show how workers can shift back and forth between maladaptive and adaptive perfectionism cycles throughout their careers. We reveal new insights at the intersection of high-performance pressure, dehumanization, and perfectionism, offering dehumanization and rehumanization as key mechanisms linking the environment and perfectionism. We also discuss how our findings, though in an extreme context, apply to other high-pressure workplace environments, and open new opportunities to explore the processes of maladaptive and adaptive perfectionism in other domains.