The Perfectionism Tax: How High Standards Cost You

Perfectionism is the one flaw people volunteer in interviews, because everyone involved has agreed to treat it as a strength in disguise. High standards. Commitment to quality. An unwillingness to let anything out of the door half-finished.

There is a straightforward way to test whether that reading survives contact with evidence. Ask what perfectionism does to performance.

The Finding That Should Have Settled This

Harari, Swider, Steed and Breidenthal pooled the workplace research on perfectionism in a 2018 meta-analysis for the Journal of Applied Psychology. They worked with two dimensions: excellence-seeking perfectionism, which is the pursuit of very high standards, and failure-avoiding perfectionism, which is the effort to never fall short.

Their result on performance was that “neither excellence-seeking nor failure-avoiding perfectionism were significantly associated with job performance”. Perfectionism did relate positively to motivation and engagement. That, in their phrasing, “did not translate into improved performance”.

This is the part worth sitting with. The trait that executives defend on the grounds that it produces better work shows no reliable association with better work. What it does show is a bill. The authors’ own conclusion was that “perfectionism is likely not constructive at work”, citing what they called the net detrimental effect for employees and organisations.

One honest caveat: no association in a meta-analysis is not the same as proof that perfectionism never helps anyone anywhere. It does mean that the confident version of the interview answer has nothing behind it.

Two Kinds, Two Different Bills

The two dimensions do not cost the same.

Excellence-seeking was “strongly associated with higher levels of engagement, motivation, and conscientiousness”, and moderately associated with higher stress, anxiety and workaholism. It buys you a genuinely useful disposition and charges a moderate premium for it.

Failure-avoiding was “strongly associated with indicators of poor well-being, such as higher levels of burnout, stress, anxiety, and depression”, together with lower conscientiousness and lower engagement. This is the expensive one. It charges the premium and withholds the disposition.

Both answer the interview question identically. From the outside they are almost impossible to tell apart, because both produce someone who works late and checks things twice. The difference is what the person is reaching for, and that is only visible from the inside.

Whose Standard Is It

Hewitt and Flett conceptualised perfectionism in 1991 as a trait with three dimensions, distinguished by where the demand sits. Self-oriented perfectionism “characterizes striving rigidly for perfection” and is described in the literature as double-edged. Other-oriented perfectionism “involves demanding perfection from others”. Socially prescribed perfectionism “characterizes a tendency to perceive others as demanding perfection”.

The third one deserves separate attention, and the attribution needs care. Socially prescribed perfectionism “consistently shows strong associations with indicators of psychological distress such as depression”. That body of findings comes from later work, not from the 1991 paper, which did the conceptual work of separating the dimensions.

For a senior leader the distinction has a practical edge. A standard you hold yourself to is yours to renegotiate. A standard you believe the board, the market or the people who promoted you are holding you to feels non-negotiable, which is why it is worth asking whether anyone has actually stated it.

What It Costs in the Running of Things

The research speaks about well-being and performance in the aggregate. The operational costs show up in the texture of a week, and they tend to look like this.

Delegation stops working. If nothing arrives at the required standard, the work comes back to you, and you become the constraint on your own organisation.
Decisions arrive late. A decision made on complete information is usually a decision made after the window closed.
Early work stops reaching you. People learn not to bring a draft to someone who responds to drafts as though they were finished products. What you then see is polished, late, and already committed.

None of these registers as a perfectionism problem while it is happening. Each one registers as other people being slow.

The Part That Is Interpretation

What follows is a reading rather than a finding, and it is worth labelling as such.

Much of the perfectionism visible at senior level seems to function as protection. Work that cannot be criticised leaves no opening through which the person behind it can be judged inadequate. On that reading the standard is doing a job that has little to do with quality, which would explain why raising it never produces relief.

There is an older description of the same territory. Clance and Imes introduced the term impostor phenomenon in 1978 after working with 150 highly successful women across law, nursing, medicine, social work and university teaching. Their observation was that negative feedback was retained as evidence of deficiency while success was explained away, and that these women “often experienced a terror of failure”.

Two things about that paper get misreported. It was clinical observation of a selected group seen in psychotherapy, interactional groups and small classes, which makes it a description of a pattern instead of a measurement of how common it is. And the restriction to women was a feature of who walked into those rooms. Clance and Imes said at the time that whether men experienced it needed investigating; later work using structured interviews and questionnaires found men reporting it with comparable frequency, and in Topping’s 1983 study of university faculty the men in her sample were considerably more likely to report it than the women.

Excellence Has a Stopping Point

The distinction worth holding onto has nothing to do with how much you care about quality. Excellence is defined by the outcome and therefore has a point at which it is reached, while failure-avoidance is defined by a feeling and therefore has none.

So the question to put to a piece of work is narrow. What standard does this actually require, and what am I adding past that point? Everything past that point is being added for reasons that have nothing to do with the work, and naming the reason is what makes it optional.

And if the pattern has moved past a question about standards into something that is affecting how you function, that belongs with a licensed professional. Nothing here substitutes for one.

Finding Out What the Standard Is Protecting

Standards that cannot be relaxed are usually holding something up. The Executive Identity Profile is a confidential assessment of where your sense of worth currently rests across five dimensions, and which of them is carrying more weight than it can bear. It takes about ten minutes. Begin your profile here.

If this was worth your time, there is a letter. One short piece a week on identity, self-worth and the arithmetic of senior work. It costs nothing, and leaving takes one click. See what arrives.

References

Harari, D., Swider, B. W., Steed, L. B., & Breidenthal, A. P. (2018). Is perfect good? A meta-analysis of perfectionism in the workplace. Journal of Applied Psychology, 103(10). https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000324
Hewitt, P. L., & Flett, G. L. (1991). Perfectionism in the self and social contexts: Conceptualization, assessment, and association with psychopathology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(3), 456–470. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.60.3.456
Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241–247. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0086006
Clance, P. R., & O’Toole, M. A. (1988). The imposter phenomenon: An internal barrier to empowerment and achievement. The Haworth Press. https://doi.org/10.1300/j015v06n03_05

The Perfectionism Tax: How High Standards Become a Hidden Liability