People fl irt for many reasons, maybe to indicate an interest in a deeper relationship or simply for fun or to entice a boss into a promotion. • The latter can be called “strategic flirting,” or the idea that flirting in the office place will help people advance in their careers. • Turns out, it often backfires, and the flirt faces the disapproval of others in the business. Lex Smith, assistant professor of management in OSU’s Spears School of Business, recently presented a study of women in the workplace showing that strategic flirtation can cause more damage than the risk of a hair-pulling match with the target’s significant other. “There’s not a lot of literature in the management area that looks at flirtation as a way of getting your foot in the door or moving up,” Smith says. “Some studies have shown that flirtatious behavior is actually damaging to your reputation.” It’s what Miss Alice Reighly, president of the Anti-Flirt Club formed in Washington, D.C., in the early 1920s warned against decades ago in the club’s 10 rules: “Don’t flirt: those who flirt in haste oft repent in leisure.”
FLIRTING TOOL BACKFIRES The study was part of the first paper Smith started working on in her doctorate program at Tulane University. She was a doctoral candidate and Ph.D. project member from 2004 to 2010. She earned her doctorate in management in 2010.
“Our study shows, in fact, that people will generally use whatever tool is at their fingertips. In more masculine environments, women will use the flirting tool more readily,” Smith says. “The environment will not support that, despite encouraging it.” Smith’s research included categorizing several law firms into masculine and feminine cultures. Masculine offices may encourage women to flirt more, but if they do flirt, the office staff will not support them and will punish them. “Punishment can appear subtle, such as not being cc’ed on a memo ‘accidentally,’ or not receiving emails ‘accidentally on purpose,’” she says. “In more feminine environments, we find that women are not punished as much.” There is a broad spectrum of behaviors commonly considered flirtatious, Smith says. “Because we were interested in women’s behavior, we looked at behaviors they defined as flirtatious,” she says. The researchers met with focus groups of women lawyers in
New Orleans in different stages of their careers. Smith and her team asked the women if they flirted or observed flirting in their workplaces. “They observed 40 to 50 behaviors they considered flirtatious, and we got the list down to about 10
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Flirting in the Workplace Researcher Lex Smith says examples of women’s strategic fl irtations included in the study were “the kind of behaviors you might see in a date, but done overtly in a work setting.” For example: •
Allowing a man to peek down her shirt
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Smiling flirtatiously
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Having a romantic fling with a man at the office
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Giving massages
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Winking
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Laughing flirtatiously
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