THE NEW RULES FOR RECKONING WITH SEXUAL ATTRACTION IN THE WORKPLACE
Today men and women are thrust together on the job, sharing the workplace in equal numbers and, increasingly often, as professional peers. Work is becoming a major source of intimate interaction between them as they daily share the physical proximity of working side by side, the stimulation of professional challenge, and the powerful passions of accomplishment and failure.
Like every other kind of intimacy, the workplace variety brings with it the likelihood of sexual attraction. It is natural. It is inevitable, hard-wired as we are to respond to certain kinds of stimuli, although it sometimes comes as a surprise to those it strikes. But sexual attraction in the office is virtually inevitable for other reasons as well: The workplace is an ideal pre-screener, likely to throw us together with others our own age having similar socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, similar sets of values, and similar aspirations.
It also offers countless opportunities for working friendships to develop. As teams come to dominate the structure of the business world, the other half of a business team is increasingly likely to be not only a colleague with complementary skills and interests, but an attractive member of the opposite sex. As close as the collaboration between men and women workers can get at the office, it may be even more so outside it, as workers today function in an extended workplace of irregular hours and non-office settings. We are now more likely than ever, for example, to share the intimate isolation of business travel.
Such opportunity for interaction between the sexes is, in the grand scheme of things, really rather new. Traditionally, society limits the opportunities for relationships between the sexes--how it does so is typically one of the distinguishing features of a culture. Until recently, unmarried men and women who were attracted to each other could date, court, or marry without raising eyebrows. For attracted couples who were already committed to others, the only option was to avoid each other or give in to an affair that consumed great energy just to be kept secret. So new is our sharing of the workplace that we have not yet created rules or social structures for dealing with today's unfamiliar intermixture of men and women working together.
The problem is not that sexual attraction inhabits the workplace, but that the options we traditionally give ourselves for recognizing that passion are far too limited. Conventional thinking tells us there is only one place to take our sexual feelings--to bed together. The modern American mind equates sexual attraction with sexual intercourse--the word "sex" serves as a synonym for physical contact. But intercourse is only one possible outcome among many.
Sexual attraction can be managed. It is not only possible to acknowledge sexual attraction, but also to enjoy the energy generated by it--and without acting on it sexually. The positive energy of sexual attraction is instead focused on work as it pulls men and women into a process of discovery, creativity and productivity. This thinking is part of a broader ethic emerging in this country: It's possible to have a lot without having it all.
We propose a new, psychologically unique relationship for which no models currently exist in American culture. It is a positive way for men and women to share intimate feelings outside of marriage or an illicit affair. It rejects altogether the saint-or-sinner model of colleague relations as too simplistic for modern life. In our own work as management consultants, we see the new relationship slowly unfolding in the American workplace. Confused coworkers, lacking guidance of any kind but responding to today's workplace realities, are stumbling toward new ways of relating to each other as they find the old alternatives too confining or otherwise unacceptable. The relationship they are inventing is not quite romantic--but it's not Platonic, either. It adds a dimension of increased intimacy to friendship and removes the sexual aspect from love. We call this relationship More than Friends, Less than Lovers.
The new sexually energized but strictly working relationship has already been officially documented. In a study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan, 22 percent of managers reported involvement in such a relationship. Moreover, the relationship, unleashing as it does a great deal of creative energy, was shown to benefit both "couple" and company. And a study at the University of North Dakota found that work teams composed of men and women were more productive than those of same-sex colleagues.
