How Does Intimacy Impede Objectivity in Professional Judgment, Performance Assessments, and Leadership Decisions?
Intimacy is an essential part of human life, but it can also pose problems when used in professional settings. When people are close to each other, they may find it difficult to be objective about their relationships or work interactions because intimacy clouds judgment. Intimate bonds can create conflicts of interest that impede objectivity in performance assessments, decision making, and leadership decisions. This article explains how this happens.
What Is Intimacy in Relationships?
Intimacy refers to closeness between people who share private feelings, thoughts, values, beliefs, experiences, or vulnerabilities. Intimacy involves emotional connection, trust, empathy, mutual support, and affection. It can occur between family members, friends, romantic partners, colleagues, supervisors, mentors, students, or clients. Intimacy can be platonic or erotic. It often results from shared experiences, personal disclosure, and emotional investment.
How Can Intimacy Hinder Objectivity?
When two people have a close relationship, one person may feel loyalty or obligation toward the other. They may fear hurting the other's feelings if they give negative feedback. Or, they may believe the other deserves special treatment due to past favors, shared history, or similarities. This attitude undermines objectivity by compromising fairness, transparency, accuracy, impartiality, and accountability. It makes it harder to evaluate performance fairly and accurately. Intimacy can also limit professional autonomy by influencing what people say, do, or allow others to do.
Consider these examples:
- A teacher gives better grades to her friend's child because she wants them to remain friends. - A manager hires someone with poor qualifications but good social skills because he hopes to impress his girlfriend. - An employee lets a co-worker get away with unethical behavior because they are in a secret affair. - A doctor refuses to report sexual misconduct by an influential patient for fear of retaliation.
Intimacy clouds judgment by creating biases that distort reality, prioritize personal interests over professional ones, and favor subjective feelings over objective facts.
The Solution
The solution is to recognize intimate relationships as potential conflicts of interest. People should avoid getting too close to colleagues or clients, disclose relationships promptly, and take steps to ensure objectivity. This includes recusing themselves from decision making, seeking input from neutral parties, using data instead of intuition, and applying standard policies equally. Organizations should create clear rules about relationships and enforce them consistently. Managers should set boundaries on emotionally charged issues like criticism and feedback.
Professionals must remember that their primary duty is to serve the organization, not their relationships or egos.
Intimacy impedes objectivity in professional judgments, assessments, and leadership decisions. To preserve integrity, individuals and organizations must acknowledge this risk and take steps to minimize it.
In what ways does the presence of intimacy impede objectivity in professional judgment, performance assessments, and leadership decisions?
The presence of intimacy can lead to biased judgements, decision making and evaluations in professional environments due to various reasons. Intimate relationships may influence personal perception, memory recall, interpretation of information and communication channels between individuals. People tend to favor those who they are close to, thus leading to favoritism which is not appropriate in workplace settings.