Speak Up to Get Your Supervisor to Notice You, Study Says

Quiet? If so, your boss may not be paying too much attention to you.

A recent study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that managers were less likely to notice or place value in a suggestion from workers who are introverted, recently hired or racial minorities.

Supervisors are brushing them off, said one of the study authors, David Harrison, a professor at University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business, told Bloomberg.

They may not consider input to be useful if it comes from employees in those categories, Harrison said.

Authored by five professors from New York University’s Stern School of Business, Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business, the study analyzed how much supervisors at 89 credit union offices rewarded employees for speaking their mind.

The authors had credit union employees to rate the number of times they talked about problems or ideas to their superiors, then asked the supervisors what they noticed or cared about from the employees’ comments.

Out of the hundreds of responses, when non-minorities or employees who had been with the company for more than a year said something, their contributions were considered to be more valuable than minorities or new hires.

Supervisors paid the most attention to and gave the most consideration to office extroverts, the study found. They got more credit than employees in other groups who offered their say the same amount.

The study also found that talkative women were valued over men, which the authors concluded was because the respondents from the credit unions were mostly female and being a majority in the workplace helped get their position across.

Over time, speaking up made a positive difference in the respondents careers.

One year later, the authors of the study asked the same group of supervisors to rate the performance of their employees. The talkative employees earned higher marks, according to Bloomberg.

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