The crab that never climbs. Does New Zealand have a crab mentality, and could it be affecting the job market?

Ask the question in a New Zealand pub and you will likely get a nod before you finish the sentence. Of course we do, the received wisdom goes; we cut down our tall poppies, we always have. Ask it of the evidence and the answer gets more interesting, because the thing New Zealand actually has may not be a crab mentality at all. It may be something quieter, harder to photograph, and in a labour market as bruised as this one, possibly more expensive.

Start with the definitions, because they are not the same thing and the difference turns out to matter.

Crab mentality is the bucket story: crabs in a bucket need no lid, because any crab that climbs gets pulled back down by the others. The pull is pre-emptive and envy-driven, aimed at anyone trying to rise, and it costs the puller something too. The term’s home turf is Filipino discourse, where it is a live and much-argued cultural critique. Tall poppy syndrome, the Australasian cousin, punishes people who have already risen: the scrutiny, the sneering, the “who does she think she is” that arrives with visible success. One is sabotage on the way up; the other is a scything at the top. Both suppress ambition, but through different doors.

Here is the first finding of this investigation, and it is a small one worth stating plainly: in the 2024 to 2026 New Zealand media record we reviewed, we found no local coverage using “crab mentality” or “crab bucket” to describe the job market. In that record, New Zealand talks about itself in the language of tall poppies, not crabs. So the honest version of the question becomes: does tall poppy syndrome exist here, is there a crab-like component to it, and can either be connected to how people are hired, paid, promoted, and retained? That is the question this piece answers, and where the evidence runs out, we say so.

The evidence that it exists

There is a genuine but limited research base. The empirical starting point is Norman Feather’s research programme at Flinders University, beginning with “Attitudes towards the high achiever: the fall of the tall poppy” in the Australian Journal of Psychology in 1989 [2], which spent a decade measuring how Australians felt about high achievers and about their falls. The foundational New Zealand study is Jodyanne Kirkwood’s 2007 paper in the Journal of Management & Organization, “Tall Poppy Syndrome: implications for entrepreneurship in New Zealand” [1]. Kirkwood interviewed 40 New Zealand entrepreneurs. Over half reported experiencing tall poppy syndrome, and the coping strategies they described are the part worth sitting with: “staying under the radar,” not telling people they owned a business, and not “flaunting” wealth. Kirkwood raises a further possible implication that would matter for a job market, that some may limit the growth of their firms to avoid attention, though that is offered as a possibility rather than an observed behaviour.

The evidence did not stop in 2007. A 2017 study by Pierce, Hodge, Taylor and Button documented the same dynamic among elite New Zealand athletes [3]. A 2015 University of Canterbury cross-sectional survey of 229 employees found that perceiving a workplace as favouring the fall of tall poppies was associated with lower decision-making dependability and greater decision avoidance [4]. And after the 2021 death of the young entrepreneur Jake Millar prompted national debate about how this country treats its strivers, Kirkwood and the University of Auckland’s Rod McNaughton surveyed 297 people: 90 per cent believed tall poppy syndrome exists in New Zealand, and respondents reported self-doubt, anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, lost opportunities, and emigration as consequences [5]. The cutting, notably, came mostly face to face, from colleagues, not from strangers on the internet.

Two caveats, because we checked and they matter. That 90 per cent figure comes from a self-selected sample, 76 per cent of it women, and the researchers themselves acknowledged a representative sample would likely produce a lower number. Believing the syndrome exists is also not the same as measuring its incidence. We found no nationally representative prevalence study of tall poppy syndrome in New Zealand. What we have is consistent qualitative and survey evidence, across two decades, that participants across several New Zealand settings, entrepreneurs, athletes and employees, describe success as something to be concealed.

There is also an institutional response worth noting. E Tū Tāngata, a Christchurch trust founded explicitly to combat tall poppy thinking, was reported in June 2025 to be working with 27 schools, and at one of them, Rowley School, attendance was reported to have risen from 40 per cent to over 80 per cent alongside the programme, though that was reported rather than established through a controlled evaluation [6]. An institutional response of that size is context, not proof of a syndrome.

The job market this culture is operating in

Now the numbers, because the backdrop is the highest unemployment rate in over a decade.

Unemployment hit 5.6 per cent in the June 2026 quarter, the highest in more than ten years, and worse than almost every bank forecast. Underutilisation is 13.8 per cent, around 440,000 people. For the young it is grim in a way that should alarm anyone: underutilisation for 15 to 24 year olds reached 37 per cent, with unemployment at 25.3 per cent for those aged 15 to 19 [7]. Wages, measured by the Labour Cost Index, grew 2 per cent in the year to June while inflation ran at 4.1 per cent, so pay is trailing prices [8]. Job ads are recovering, up 12.2 per cent year on year in May per the BNZ-SEEK report, but applications per ad have been at elevated levels for over two years [9]. It is an employers’ market.

Five threads

Thread one: many never ask

A SEEK survey of over a thousand New Zealand workers, reported in May 2026, found 46 per cent had never asked for a pay rise in their working lives, and only 32 per cent felt comfortable initiating a salary conversation. Only 24 per cent of the pay rises that did happen were performance-based [10].

In an economy where pay is trailing prices, the gap between workers who negotiate and workers who wait compounds. The survey does not establish why so many never ask, so whether New Zealand’s modesty norm is what puts them on the “wait” side is a question it raises rather than answers.

Thread two: official guidance draws a line around confidence

This was, for us, the single most striking document of the investigation. Immigration New Zealand runs a page for migrants titled “Be ‘Kiwi confident’”, which advises, in the government’s own words, that in a New Zealand job interview “you should be confident, but not so much that it seems like you are too important for the job or the company,” and that evidence of your abilities should be offered “in a way that does not seem like you are boastful” [11]. This does not establish tall poppy syndrome. But it shows that the line between confidence and boastfulness is explicit enough to appear in official interview guidance.

Thread three: the workplace is rough

The much-repeated claim that New Zealand has the second-worst workplace bullying in the developed world traces to a 2009-10 Massey-led study of 1,700 workers in four high-risk sectors, which found 17.8 per cent met the bullying threshold; the sample was 80 per cent female and sector-skewed, and the claim has been fairly criticised, so we will not repeat it as fact [12]. The sturdier international comparison is the Lloyd’s Register Foundation and Gallup World Risk Poll, which found 42 per cent of New Zealand workers reporting lifetime workplace violence or harassment against a global average of 21 per cent, with Australia and New Zealand together the worst-scoring region measured [13].

Jarrod Haar’s 2023 work found fewer than 10 per cent of New Zealand workers reporting no experience of bullying in the prior year [14], and a 2024 Human Rights Commission and KPMG report, Counting the Cost, estimated the combined annual cost of workplace bullying, sexual harassment and racial harassment at around $1.34 billion [15]. None of these studies isolates tall poppy dynamics as the cause, and none shows the visible are targeted more than anyone else. What can be said is narrower: the Kirkwood-McNaughton respondents reported that the cutting they experienced happened mostly face to face, from colleagues, which is the same setting the bullying research describes.

Thread four: the gendered edge

Rumeet Billan’s 2023 “Tallest Poppy” study surveyed 4,710 women across 103 countries and found 86.8 per cent reported being penalised or undermined at work for their achievements, with about half having left a job because of it [16]. Its limits have to be stated plainly: the sample was mostly Canadian and American, there is no New Zealand breakout, and, because it surveyed only women with no male comparison group, it reports what those women experienced rather than showing that women are singled out relative to men. It cannot be cited as New Zealand evidence. The New Zealand-specific work pointing in a similar direction includes the Victoria University Language in the Workplace project’s Gender and Language paper on women leaders managing the tall poppy challenge [17]. That Kirkwood’s 2022 survey respondents were 76 per cent women says something about who was most moved to respond, not who experiences the issue most.

Thread five: the exit

One place to look for how the culture meets the job market is the airport. In 2024, a record 72,002 New Zealand citizens left the country, a net citizen loss of about 47,000, with 56 per cent of leavers bound for Australia. In the June 2026 year the outflow slowed but did not stop: 63,900 citizen departures against 26,200 returns, a net citizen loss of 37,700 [18]. On why people leave, the cleanest evidence is what those planning to go say: Robert Walters’ 2025 survey found 67 per cent of the New Zealand employees it surveyed were planning a move within a year, only 10 per cent believed they were paid fairly, and among those planning to relocate, 43 per cent cited higher salaries and 42 per cent were considering Australia. Its ANZ chief executive Shay Peters put it in one line: “New Zealand seems to have lost its aspirational reputation” [19]. A 2026 Koi Tū analysis examined the scale, composition and economic implications of New Zealand’s citizen departures without identifying tall poppy culture as a cause [20]. That absence matters: migration is documented; the cultural explanation remains unmeasured.

The verdict, carefully

So: does New Zealand have a crab mentality, and could it be affecting employment?

On the first half, our reading is this. The search turned up little evidence for a separate crab-mentality construct, and stronger evidence for tall-poppy criticism of the already-visible and for self-concealment, the quiet cousin the crab metaphor misses. Behaviours consistent with self-concealment recur: Kirkwood’s entrepreneurs staying under the radar, the 46 per cent who report never once asking for a raise, official guidance telling newcomers to be confident but not boastful. None proves a cultural cause on its own. If we had to name the pattern, it looks less like the crab that pulls others down and more like the crab that has learned not to climb where anyone can see. The pulling hand and the ducked head point to the same bucket.

On the second half, precision matters. There is no econometric study quantifying tall poppy syndrome’s effect on New Zealand unemployment, wages or hiring; we found no evidence supporting a national cost estimate for the syndrome, and the productivity link, though argued forcefully by commentators like the NZ Initiative’s Oliver Hartwich [23], does not appear in the official productivity literature we reviewed. What the evidence offers is not a proven mechanism but a set of converging signals, each documented on its own terms, that any explanation has to account for: entrepreneurs who report concealing their success, a workforce in which 46 per cent have never asked for a raise while pay trails prices, a workplace-harassment rate well above the global average, and a sustained outflow of citizens, while 43 per cent of surveyed employees planning to relocate cited higher salaries. What no source establishes is that tall poppy culture caused any of these. The honest summary is that the phenomena overlap, the overlap is suggestive, and the causal link is unmeasured. That gap is itself a finding, and it is measurable: exit surveys at the border, a representative prevalence study, and a hard look at whether “overqualified” is functioning as a hiring euphemism would help close it.

And the counterweight deserves its say, because it is not stupid. Heather du Plessis-Allan’s 2020 rebuttal pointed at ticker-tape parades and national pride in Taika Waititi and argued the syndrome is an excuse successful people reach for when criticised on the merits [21]. Melbourne’s Nick Haslam argued in 2025 that the norm reflects genuine egalitarian values, that a culture ignoring inequality “may lose sight of the collective good,” and that the cure could be worse than the disease [22]. They are right that tall poppy talk can be a shield. But shields get built where arrows fly, and the arrows in this record, a survey in which 90 per cent said the blade is real and a government website teaching newcomers how much confidence is allowed, did not come from nowhere.

The thread we will pull next

A previous investigation for this project, our article on the AI hiring loop, laid out a pipeline in which AI increasingly sits on both sides of the application, and raised the question of whether the register such screening rewards is the fluent, confident, keyword-dense kind. That article was careful not to claim the point as established, least of all for New Zealand, where it found no local measurement at all.

Hold that open question beside what you have just read: a culture that prizes modesty, and official guidance that tells newcomers to be confident but not boastful. If AI screening does reward a fluent, confident, keyword-dense register, then a cultural lean toward understatement could sit awkwardly against it in AI-screened hiring processes. Whether that actually disadvantages anyone, and who, is unmeasured. Somebody should study it. We state this as a hypothesis, and it is ours.

Sources

1. Kirkwood, J., “Tall Poppy Syndrome: implications for entrepreneurship in New Zealand”, Journal of Management & Organization 13(4), 2007.
2. Feather, N. T., “Attitudes towards the high achiever: the fall of the tall poppy”, Australian Journal of Psychology 41(3), 1989.
3. Pierce, Hodge, Taylor and Button, “Tall poppy syndrome: perceptions and experiences of elite New Zealand athletes”, International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 2017.
4. Dediu, V., University of Canterbury thesis (cross-sectional survey, N=229), 2015, UC research repository.
5. University of Auckland, “Research shows tall poppy syndrome negatively affects New Zealand entrepreneurs”, 20 July 2022 (Kirkwood and McNaughton survey, n=297).
6. 1News, “Truancy rates drop at 27 schools thanks to Christchurch charity”, 26 June 2025 (E Tū Tāngata).
7. Stats NZ, Labour market statistics: June 2026 quarter.
8. Stats NZ, Labour Cost Index (annual wage inflation), year to June 2026.
9. BNZ-SEEK Employment Report, May 2026 (job ads up 12.2% year on year).
10. SEEK New Zealand, Salary Pulse survey (n over 1,000), reported May 2026.
11. Immigration New Zealand, “Be ‘Kiwi confident’”.
12. Bentley et al., “Workplace bullying in New Zealand” (Massey-led study, 2009-10) (the “second-worst” framing is contested and not repeated here as fact).
13. Lloyd’s Register Foundation and Gallup, World Risk Poll (workplace violence and harassment).
14. Haar, J. (Massey University), workplace bullying research, 2023.
15. Human Rights Commission and KPMG, “Counting the Cost”, 2024 (combined cost of workplace bullying, sexual harassment and racial harassment).
16. Billan, R., “The Tallest Poppy”, Women of Influence+, 2023 (n=4,710 women, 103 countries; no New Zealand breakout).
17. Holmes, Marra and Lazzaro-Salazar, “Negotiating the tall poppy syndrome in New Zealand workplaces”, Gender and Language 11(1), 2017.
18. Stats NZ, international migration (June 2026 year release).
19. Robert Walters, New Zealand workforce trends survey, 2025 (via Scoop, 17 January 2025).
20. Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures, “Brain drain or business as usual?”, 2026.
21. Heather du Plessis-Allan, “NZ doesn’t have tall poppy syndrome”, Newstalk ZB / NZ Herald, 2020.
22. Haslam, N., “Australia and New Zealand are plagued by tall poppy syndrome. But would a cure be worse than the disease?”, The Conversation, 2025.
23. The New Zealand Initiative (Oliver Hartwich), “Tall poppy syndrome leaves Kiwis working harder not smarter”, 2025.