Why Hard Work Doesn't Always Pay Off: The Psychology of Workplace Myths
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. And today, we're going to talk about something that feels true to a lot of people because it's supposed to. We're told that success is earned, that if you just work hard enough, if you hustle, if you follow the rules, you'll be rewarded. That promotions, respect, and financial security go to the most qualified people.
Leslie Poston:That the workplace is a meritocracy. It's a comforting story, but not a very accurate one. In reality, meritocracy in the workplace is often an illusion, a powerful one, one that shapes how we judge ourselves, how we judge others, and how systems justify inequality. Today, we're unpacking the psychological, cultural, and structural pieces of that illusion, why it's so persistent, who benefits from it, and why it's quietly doing all of us harm. Let's start with the basics.
Leslie Poston:Meritocracy is the belief that people rise or fall based on their abilities and effort. In this worldview, the workplace is a kind of neutral playing field where talent gets rewarded, laziness gets punished, and outcomes are fair. There's a reason this idea has so much staying power. Psychologically, it serves multiple functions that help us navigate uncertainty and maintain our sense of agency. First, there's what we call the just world hypothesis.
Leslie Poston:Research has shown that people have a deep psychological need to believe that their world is fundamentally fair, that good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people. This belief helps people feel safer and more in control of their own fate. But here's the problem. When we apply just world thinking to workplace outcomes, we end up victim blaming. If someone doesn't get promoted, we assume they must have done something wrong.
Leslie Poston:If someone is laid off, we look for reasons why they deserved it. We do this because the alternative, accepting that unfairness is systemic and often random, feels too threatening. The just world hypothesis works hand in hand with what we call the fundamental attribution error. This is our tendency to explain other people's outcomes based on their character while explaining our own outcomes based on circumstances. So when a colleague gets ahead, we assume it's because they're naturally talented or politically savvy.
Leslie Poston:When we don't get ahead, we focus on external barriers, an unfair boss, a broken system, or bad timing. Meritocracy exploits this cognitive bias. It encourages us to see success as a personal achievement while making failure feel like a personal flaw. And there's also the illusion of control at play here. Research has demonstrated that people consistently overestimate their ability to influence outcomes, especially in ambiguous situations.
Leslie Poston:The workplace is full of ambiguity, unclear promotion criteria, subjective performance reviews, office politics that shift without warning. In that context, believing in meritocracy gives us the illusion that we can control our career trajectory through effort alone. But perhaps more importantly, meritocracy taps into our need for cognitive consistency. The theory of cognitive dissonance, which we've talked about before, shows us that when our beliefs conflict with reality, we experience psychological discomfort. Rather than change our beliefs, we often change our interpretation of reality.
Leslie Poston:So when someone works incredibly hard but doesn't advance, instead of questioning whether the system is fair, we might conclude they're not working hard enough or not working smart enough or maybe they're just not cut out for leadership. That's psychologically easier than accepting that the game might be rigged. Research shows that Americans in particular cling tightly to this belief because it reinforces our national identity. It aligns with the mythology of the American dream where anyone can supposedly pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The promise of upward mobility is deeply ingrained even as real economic data shows it's becoming increasingly out of reach.
Leslie Poston:This cultural programming starts early. From childhood, we're taught stories about hard work paying off. The little engine that could, the tortoise and the hare, Horatio Alger tales of poor boys becoming millionaires through nothing but grit and determination. In the business world, this narrative gets amplified through what we might call survivor bias in storytelling. We hear constantly about the college dropout who became a tech billionaire, the immigrant who built an empire, the small town kid who made it to the c suite.
Leslie Poston:These stories are real, but they're not representative. For every success story we celebrate, there are thousands of people with similar backgrounds, work ethics, opportunities, and talents who didn't make it. Not because they lacked merit, but because they lacked luck, a certain connection, or the exact right circumstances. Cultural research has shown how these cultural models shape our expectations and our behavior. In American culture, the model of the self made individual is so dominant that it becomes nearly impossible to see how structural factors race, class, gender, geography, or timing influence outcomes.
Leslie Poston:This creates what we call ideological hegemony when dominant groups' worldviews become so normalized that they're accepted even by the people who are disadvantaged by them. Working class people defend tax cuts for the wealthy. Women argue against family leave policies. People of color oppose affirmative action. Why?
Leslie Poston:Because they've internalized the meritocratic narrative so deeply that they can no longer see how the system is working against them. In corporate settings, the meritocracy myth isn't just culturally comforting it's functional. It gives leaders a convenient justification for decisions that might otherwise require more transparency and accountability. A manager promotes someone who looks and talks like them? Well, they earned it.
Leslie Poston:A leadership team is mostly men from elite schools? Well, that's just where the best talent came from. A new leader comes on and fires the team of women and hires men that they've worked with before? Well, that company had better talent. It's rare for anyone to stop and ask whether the selection criteria themselves are biased, exclusionary, or simply arbitrary.
Leslie Poston:Research on system justification theory shows that people are motivated to rationalize existing social arrangements even when they're unequal because it helps reduce uncertainty and cognitive dissonance. Believing that the system is fair, even when it isn't, is psychologically easier than facing how deeply it's rigged. But system justification doesn't affect everyone equally. The people who benefit most from existing systems are the most likely to defend them. And this creates what we call the Matthew effect, a phenomenon where advantages compound over time.
Leslie Poston:Those who start with small advantages, a better network, a little more resources, cultural familiarity, accumulate larger and larger benefit, while those who start with disadvantages fall further and further behind. Organizations amplify the Matthew effect through seemingly neutral policies that actually favor the already privileged. Networking events happening after work hours disadvantage people with caregiving responsibilities or who rely on public transportation. Stretch assignments go to people who can afford to take risks. Leadership potential gets attributed to people who display confidence in culturally specific ways.
Leslie Poston:And meanwhile, the halo effect, our tendency to let one positive trait influence our overall judgment, means that once someone is marked as high potential, their mistakes get excused and their successes get amplified. Once someone is perceived as not leadership material, the opposite happens. If you've ever felt like a failure for not being promoted or wondered why your colleague who does so much less gets rewarded more or doubted your own talent despite working twice as hard, this part's for you. Meritocracy doesn't just distort reality. It also shifts blame downward, creating what psychologists are calling internalized oppression.
Leslie Poston:When people from marginalized groups don't succeed in systems that claim to be fair, they can often conclude that something is wrong with them rather than with the system. This feeds directly into impostor syndrome, the persistent feeling that you're not qualified for your role and that others will eventually discover that, oh, you're a fraud. Research first identified this phenomenon in high achieving women, but subsequent studies have shown it affects anyone who feels like an outsider in their environment. Here's the insidious part. Imposter syndrome is often a rational response to being in spaces where you are genuinely not welcome or where standards are being applied differently to you.
Leslie Poston:Instead of recognizing this as a systemic issue, we pathologize it as an individual problem that can be fixed with more confidence or a better self talk, maybe by doing a power pose in your mirror. The psychological toll of constantly questioning your own competence is enormous. It leads to what we call vigilance fatigue, the exhaustion that comes from constantly monitoring your environment for threats and adjusting your behavior to fit in. People from underrepresented groups often report feeling like they have to work twice as hard to prove themselves, and data backs this up. Stereotype threat, a groundbreaking research concept, tells us that when people are aware they might confirm negative stereotypes about their group, their performance actually suffers.
Leslie Poston:So a black employee worrying about being seen as angry might become less assertive in meetings. A woman concerned about being seen as too emotional might suppress legitimate concerns. The very awareness of bias creates additional cognitive load that impacts performance, And this creates a vicious cycle. Marginalized employees underperform due to extra stress and cognitive burden, which gets interpreted as evidence that they're less capable, which reinforces the biases that created the problem in the first place. Let's be clear: talent and effort do matter, but they're far from the whole story.
Leslie Poston:Who gets ahead at work often depends on networks, visibility, communication style, pedigree, and perceived confidence, factors that are deeply shaped by socioeconomic background. And this is where the concept of cultural capital becomes crucial. Research shows that people bring with them a set of habits, tastes, and ways of moving through the world that signal status to gatekeepers even if they're unaware of it. People who know how to perform professionalism, something we've talked about in a previous in the dominant style tend to get ahead faster even if others have stronger technical skills. Studies on class reproduction have shown that middle and upper class children are often trained from a young age to navigate institutions and advocate for themselves in ways that later look like competence in professional settings.
Leslie Poston:They learn to speak up in meetings, question authority respectfully, and present themselves with confidence. Working class children, by contrast, are often taught to defer to authority and not make waves. These are adaptive strategies in their environments, but they can be misread as a lack of leadership potential in professional settings. Research on hiring in elite professional service firms revealed that managers often selected candidates not based on objective performance but on culture fit, shared hobbies, communication style, even how you dress. These subjective preferences were framed as indicators of merit, but in practice, they reinforced class, racial, and gender bias.
Leslie Poston:The concept of homophily, the tendency for similar people to associate with each other, means that hiring managers unconsciously favor candidates who remind them of themselves. This isn't necessarily malicious. It can be, but it definitely systematically excludes people from different backgrounds. And there's also this issue of social networks and what we call the strength of weak ties. Many of the best job opportunities are never posted publicly.
Leslie Poston:They're filled through informal networks. If you don't have access to those networks, you're automatically excluded from opportunities regardless of your qualifications. In theory, digital hiring tools and artificial intelligence decision systems are supposed to eliminate bias. In practice, they often replicate and reinforce it while adding a veneer of objectivity that makes bias harder to detect and challenge. A recent field study tested algorithmic hiring tools and found that bias emerged not only from the data being fed into the system, but from how designers operationalized fairness.
Leslie Poston:In other words, even when building tech to improve merit based decisions, bias seeped in, both from historical patterns and from human assumptions about what merit looks like. These systems often penalize candidates who don't follow dominant cultural norms. Unstructured resumes, gaps due to caregiving, alternative educational backgrounds, nontraditional career paths, all things a human will contextually understand become automatic rejections in an algorithmic system. The problem is what computer scientists call algorithmic bias. When we train these algorithmic systems on historical data, they learn to reproduce historical patterns of discrimination.
Leslie Poston:If companies have historically hired mostly white men for leadership roles, the algorithm will learn that white men make better leaders, not because it's true, but because that's what the available data shows. Even worse, these systems create what we call weapons of math destruction. They operate at scale, have opaque decision making processes, and create feedback loops that reinforce inequality. When candidates are rejected by an algorithm, they rarely get feedback about why, making it impossible to improve or challenge the decision. This automation bias, our tendency to trust automated systems even when they're wrong, means that hiring managers often defer to algorithmic recommendations without questioning them.
Leslie Poston:What gets coded as neutral and objective is actually built on historical patterns of advantage and exclusion. Let's connect this to our previous episode on institutional gaslighting. One of the most subtle forms of workplace gaslighting is when companies use meritocratic language to shut down concerns about inequality. An employee points out a racial pay gap. Leadership responds with, we only promote based on performance.
Leslie Poston:A disabled worker asks for accommodations and is told they need to meet the same standards as everyone else. A woman is passed over for a promotion and is told the other candidate was just a better fit. On the surface, these sound like objective statements, but they erase context. They ignore barriers, and they subtly imply that speaking up is equivalent to asking for special treatment. This is what we call color blind ideology, the idea that treating everyone the same is automatically fair.
Leslie Poston:But treating people the same in an unequal system just perpetuates inequality. That's like insisting that everyone has an equal opportunity to reach a high shelf while ignoring that some people are standing on ladders. Research on stereotype content shows that marginalized groups are often perceived as less competent, even when performance is equal. Studies reveal that competence and warmth are the two primary dimensions by which we judge others, and that different groups get stereotyped differently along these dimensions. Women might be seen as warm but not competent.
Leslie Poston:Asian Americans might be seen as competent but not warm. Black Americans often face negative stereotypes on both dimensions. These unconscious biases affect everything from performance evaluations to promotion decisions, but they're invisible to people who hold them. When companies claim objectivity but fail to audit their assumptions, they end up using merit as a way to reinforce existing biases and punish people who don't conform to a dominant norm. Perhaps the most insidious effect of workplace meritocracy is how it turns structural inequality into personal doubt and self blame.
Leslie Poston:If you are constantly told that hard work leads to success, and you're working hard but not advancing, what conclusion do you draw? For many people, it's that something is wrong with them. They develop what we call learned helplessness, something we've talked about before, and the belief that their actions don't matter and that they're powerless to change the situation. Classic experiments showed that when animals were subjected to uncontrollable negative events, they eventually stopped trying to escape even when escape was possible. The same thing happens to people in toxic work environments.
Leslie Poston:When their efforts consistently fail to produce results not because they're incompetent but because the system is rigged they eventually stop trying. And this feeds into what we call attribution theory. When people experience failure, they make attributions about the cause. These attributions can be internal or external, stable or unstable, global or specific. The most psychologically damaging attributions are internal I'm not good enough Stable.
Leslie Poston:I'll never be good enough. And global. I'm a failure at everything. Meritocracy encourages these toxic attributions. It tells people that success is always earned and failure is always deserved.
Leslie Poston:This creates what we call a fixed mindset, the belief that abilities are static and unchangeable. People with fixed mindsets are more likely to give up when they face obstacles because they interpret challenges as evidence of inadequacy. The constant stress of feeling inadequate despite working hard leads to what we call allostatic load, the cumulative wear and tear on the body from chronic stress. This can manifest as anxiety, depression, insomnia, digestive issues, or a weakened immune system. The pursuit of meritocratic success is literally making us sick.
Leslie Poston:Research shows that both winners and losers in this system are harmed. The winners become obsessed with achievement and status, unable to stop performing. They suffer from what researchers call meritocratic anxiety, the constant fear of falling behind. The losers internalize failure even when they've been structurally locked out. It's a machine that runs on stress and shame, and it's wearing everyone down.
Leslie Poston:Rejecting meritocracy doesn't mean rejecting excellence or accountability. It means being honest about what really shapes outcomes and designing systems that account for structural barriers while still encouraging growth and achievement. Research on growth mindset shows that when people believe abilities can be developed through effort and good strategies, they're more resilient in the face of setbacks. But individual mindset isn't enough if the system itself is designed to exclude certain groups. This is where collective efficacy comes in.
Leslie Poston:Research shows that people's belief in their group's ability to organize and execute actions affects their motivation and performance. When organizations emphasize team success over individual competition, they can create environments where everyone has incentive to lift each other up. Some companies are experimenting with skills based hiring that focuses on what people can do rather than where they went to school or what companies they've worked for. Others are implementing blind resume reviews that strip out identifying information to reduce bias. Still others are using structured interviews with standardized questions to ensure all candidates are evaluated consistently.
Leslie Poston:The concept of psychological safety shows that teams perform better when members feel safe to speak up, ask questions, and make mistakes without fear of negative consequences. This directly contradicts meritocratic environments where people feel they must appear perfect to succeed. Restorative justice principles are also being applied in workplace settings. Instead of focusing purely on punishment and exclusion, these approaches emphasize repair, learning, and community building. When someone makes a mistake or causes harm, the focus becomes on understanding why it happened and how to prevent it in the future rather than shaming the individual.
Leslie Poston:On an individual level, recognizing meritocracy as a myth can be psychologically liberating. It can help reduce self blame and redirect energy toward a more strategic action. But individual awareness alone isn't enough to change systems. Social identity theory shows us that people derive part of their self-concept from group memberships. When members of marginalized groups connect with each other, they can develop what we call critical consciousness an awareness of structural oppression combined with a sense of agency to change it.
Leslie Poston:Employee resource groups, professional associations, and union organizing all provide opportunities for collective action. Research on social movements shows that change happens when people move from individual frustration to collective action. The concept of ally behavior is also essential. When people with privilege use their position to challenge unfair systems, it can be more effective than when marginalized people speak up alone. And this is not because marginalized voices don't matter.
Leslie Poston:It's because people in power are more likely to listen to people who look like them. Transparency is one of the most powerful tools for challenging meritocratic myths. When organizations are required to publish salary data, promotion criteria, and demographic breakdowns, it becomes harder to maintain the fiction that outcomes are purely merit based. Meritocracy in the workplace is not just an idea. It's an organizing principle.
Leslie Poston:One that's baked into our systems, our language, our expectations, and our sense of self worth. But when you start to look closely, it doesn't hold up. Not because people aren't working hard, because hard work alone has never been enough. And pretending otherwise just gives cover to systems that reward sameness, privilege, and performance over substance. The research is clear: believing in meritocracy makes us less likely to notice inequality, less willing to support policies that address it, and more likely to blame individuals for systemic problems.
Leslie Poston:It's not just wrong, it's actively harmful. Here's what gives me hope. Once you see the illusion, you can't unsee it. Once you understand how these systems really work, you can start working to change them. Once you stop blaming yourself for structural barriers, you can start building collective power to remove them.
Leslie Poston:The goal isn't to eliminate all forms of evaluation or achievement. It's to create systems that are actually fair, that account for different starting points, recognize different forms of contribution, and provide genuine equal opportunity rather than just equal treatment. Your value is not determined by your productivity. Your worth is not measured by your achievements. You are not a meritocracy of one.
Leslie Poston:Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. Remember, the system's not always fair, but your awareness can be the start of something better. And you're not alone in questioning what we've all been told is just the way things are. Until next time, stay curious, and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss a week and share it with a friend in case you think this would be interesting for them as well.
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