In Basel, should managers encourage perfectionism?
In Basel’s pharmaceutical industry, life sciences, Rhine logistics and international R&D, precision can be a legitimate job requirement. The managerial question is narrower: how can that requirement be maintained without rewarding a pursuit of perfection that has no stopping rule?
What the literature establishes
In their meta-analysis, Andrew P. Hill and Thomas Curran (2016, Personality and Social Psychology Review) distinguish striving for high standards from perfectionistic concerns, which include doubts about one’s actions and negative reactions to imperfections. These concerns have a more clearly adverse association with burnout, whereas the relationships involving the pursuit of high standards are more nuanced. Treating perfectionism as a single professional virtue therefore obscures an important distinction.
When quality becomes a continuous evaluation of the self
Christina Maslach, Wilmar B. Schaufeli and Michael P. Leiter (2001, Annual Review of Psychology) describe burnout as a prolonged response to chronic workplace stressors, rather than simply a passing state of fatigue. Their review examines, among other things, mismatches between people and their working environments. Applied to perfectionism, this perspective directs attention not only to personal standards but also to practices that make a deliverable perpetually inadequate in the organisation’s eyes.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that standards should be lowered to protect health. That would confuse requirements for safety, compliance or scientific validity with revisions whose added value has not been made explicit. The task is to define what makes work acceptable without turning every possible improvement into an obligation. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot settle
The meta-analysis covers several activity domains and is not an intervention trial in Basel companies. The observed associations do not demonstrate that an explicit stopping rule would be sufficient to prevent burnout. In practice, repeated revisions may also reflect changing requirements, poor coordination or a genuine quality problem: their frequency cannot diagnose an individual’s perfectionism.
A practical check in Basel
As part of SHR’s “Psychosocial Risks” programme, a Basel team could test a simple rule for four weeks: before producing a recurring deliverable, record its acceptance criteria and the person authorised to approve it, without changing mandatory checks. For an international R&D report, a pharmaceutical or life sciences dossier, or a Rhine logistics document, every revision after those criteria have been met receives an explicit reason: compliance, correction, a new requirement or a presentation preference. The measure is the proportion of these revisions motivated solely by a presentation preference, compared between the beginning and end of the test. This indicator makes previously invisible revisions open to discussion; it measures neither mental health nor, on its own, the effectiveness of prevention. To go further: explore the Psychosocial Risks training in Basel in the canton of Basel-Stadt, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Psychosocial Risks in Basel
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