Male Performance Pressure At Work
June 17, 2008
Talk to any woman in a relationship and you often get that if the man in their life gave as much attention to them as to his boss, they’d be topside on the Love Boat, rather than ballast in the Titanic.
What the women don’t understand is that at work, the pressure to perform is so great that e-mails, memos, all morning long brainstorming meetings, and drinks that intrude on the dinner hour are the norm. Performance pressure at work leaves them little time for relationships that demand more than an average performance. While, it is quite natural for women to ask why men obsess about work and spend so much time at work, without seemingly direct rewards or benefits? What they don’t understand is that men value job performance and career advancement, just as much as they value Sports Centre.
At the start of a relationship, men competing for a woman’s attention are at their best i.e. witty, romantic, generous, unselfish. Once the relationship develops, pressure to perform decreases. At work, that drive is the same. A man has to compete against lots of other people for jobs, for raises, for respect, and man being competitive by nature puts pressure on himself to outperform the others. However, the difference between a job setting is that the pressure to perform never decreases, even when he is the boss.
While, women have a lot of unfair stereotypes to fight against, one of the stereotypes men find themselves saddled with is that success in one’s career is a measure of their personal worth. Women can get tagged as sex objects; similarly men are at risk of being considered success objects. Not working, or working in the same job, or never mustering the drive to move up makes them feel they are dolts going-nowhere. A man’s drive to succeed comes from the desire to make more and more money, and also to earn more respect.
Playing to an audience, men tend to feel performance pressure to succeed at work, avoid making mistakes, excel when the whole company is watching. So, women need to be patient if their man doesn’t have enough time to spend on his personal life, male performance pressure at work precedes other issues, as far as men are concerned!



























