There is one scene from the beginning of my career that still lingers vividly in my memory more than a decade later. I was working as usual when I suddenly heard someone shouting and looked up over the partition. The team leader of another development team on the next row was gripping his phone and speaking angrily into it. From the conversation, I gathered that he was talking to the sales team, and that the development team had been saddled with unnecessary work because of sales’ greed or mistakes.
The reason this scene sticks out in my mind is because I got the impression that the team leader was a bit over the top with his complaints. I don’t remember all of the details, but rather than being an outrageous incident, the issue with the sales team was something that could have been handled with a little more communication. In other words, the development team could be frustrated, but not to the point of screaming on the phone in the middle of the office.
As a new employee at the time, I thought the team leader had handled the situation badly. No matter how frustrated he may have been, I questioned whether it was really appropriate to create such open and emotional conflict with a partner team he would have to keep working with in the future.
But in hindsight, I wonder if it was all intentional. For one thing, the team leader’s character wasn’t the type of person to act emotionally easily, and the location of the call was in the middle of the office where everyone could hear. Perhaps to prevent the team members from becoming frustrated with the excessive workload, the team leader himself would have taken a strong stand and sent the message “I’m on your side”. This could have been a strategic move to strengthen team cohesion and reduce the amount of stress they were feeling.
He may also have been trying to seize the upper hand in future dealings with the sales team. By clearly pointing out their mistake and the damage it caused, he could have been issuing a warning: that he would not let his own team be sacrificed again for the sake of the sales team’s results.
The reason this scene came back to me now is that I recently read something similar in Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In that book, he argues that all of us engage in some form of self-presentation in social life, and that the primary purpose of those presentations is to influence how others define a situation.
Self-presentation itself is an inevitable part of social interactions. In our daily lives, we play different social roles. At work, we play the role of a teammate, at home, we play the role of a spouse and parent, and in our relationships with friends, we play different versions of ourselves. In order to fit the role required in each situation, we have to adjust our behavior and project an image that matches the role. This is because social expectations have already been formed in that way.
In addition, this kind of self-presentation can also serve as a gateway into social relationships. Not every relationship forms naturally on its own. Often, a relationship begins because someone presents themselves in a positive light. Without some degree of performance that highlights our strengths and conceals our weaknesses, many relationships would never get off the ground at all.
As a result, Self-presentation isn’t just a way to deceive others, it’s more of a strategy that we have to learn in order to conform to social norms/expectations and build relationships.
However, it’s a little uncomfortable to write about it so openly. This is because we expect authenticity from each other, which means that we expect others to reflect their true selves. Self-presentation inevitably involves artifice, and when it’s revealed that it’s a presentation, it can give people the impression of being ‘fake’. Especially in Eastern cultures, this can lead to the perception that you are not what you appear to be, which can significantly reduce trust in you.
This is where the complexities and contradictions of human society come into play. Authenticity is something that you and I both value socially, but in practice, being authentic in all situations, without presentation, can have negative consequences. People expect and demand authenticity, but they don’t want it to disrupt social harmony and create unnecessary conflict. Therefore, personal authenticity and social norms will inevitably clash, and at some point, authenticity will have to be abandoned in favor of a staged mask.