Lockdowns, however, played havoc with this. Most workplaces were closed and people either worked from home—often in a disrupted fashion—or not at all. As a result, many people refocused on the sense of self they get from other aspects of their life.

Writing about performance-based identity for Stuff, Ben acknowledged he was as susceptible as anyone.

“Research suggests letting self-esteem hinge on performance is bad for mental health, families, and day-to-day happiness,” he warned, and he encouraged “a more deliberate, thoughtful relationship with performance, beyond the extreme, pedal-to-the-metal default society prescribes”.

A year on from the outset of the pandemic, Ben admits he still has to keep himself in check, but he is getting there. He can be seen walking the talk on his profile page on the University’s website, which includes the line: “Outside of academia, I’m a dad, golfer, gardener, aspiring music producer, and occasional cartoonist.”

Self-reflection during lockdown has enabled Ben to better accept his varied interests inside and outside work.

“I like to do a mix of everything. I don’t like to go all in on one particular thing. I’ve always been like that and have always felt uncomfortable about it, thinking I should be more focused. But now I’m like, ‘Nah, I’m just going to carry on, because that’s who I am.’”

Yellow rubbish bin with an keyboard and a banana peel.
Dried fern on a desk.
Dirty dishes with a fern in the background on a desk.

Another area of workplace performance Ben is researching—this time with a colleague from his doctoral studies and undergraduate students at the University—is what he calls “the dark side” of high performance and the ways anxiety, hyper-perfectionism, and other negative psychological processes, including anger, are often integral to it.

“Researchers have a massive tendency to frame the drivers of high performance as positive things like optimism and resilience, and that has never sat well with me because I think a lot of high performance is driven by a mix of both positive and negative things.

“We’re analysing 20 years of research papers and finding there is this massive positivity bias. Researchers tend to expect to find positive things increasing performance and negative things decreasing it and very rarely look for the opposite effects.”

Employers—and employees themselves—should broaden the spectrum of emotions and thoughts they regard as acceptable and recognise that, in some circumstances, negative, as well as positive, things are natural, says Ben.

“This is not about giving employers licence to ignore issues in their workplaces but about them approaching them in a more nuanced way. Otherwise, you have people who, if they feel a little anxious, a little stressed, think, ‘If I really was any good at my job, I wouldn’t be feeling this way.’ It’s a question of enabling employees to accept and be comfortable with what they are feeling from one moment to the next, or what they’re thinking, and not letting it throw them off track completely.”

Ben originally set out to be an architect, before realising shortly into his undergraduate degree that he “didn’t really like buildings that much”. After switching to commerce, he completed Bachelor’s, Honours, and Master’s degrees at Te Herenga Waka and then his PhD at the University of New South Wales Business School in Sydney.

“What quickly became most interesting for me was the people side of things, understanding human behaviour, social dynamics. Mine is a sort of mutant field, which is awesome, because it draws on psychology, sociology, anthropology, the humanities, and you get a mix of different perspectives.”

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