Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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SINGAPORE (Aug 30): A research from Singapore Management University (SMU) and INSEAD has shown that employees who extend help to their colleagues at work would be less likely to continue when there are signs that the economy is slowing down.

The idea behind that behaviour lies in the belief that if one person is more successful within the company, then it would be less likely for everyone else to be successful.

That behaviour is coined the “zero-sum construal of success” by Marko Pitesa, the associate professor for Organisational Behaviour & Human Resources at SMU, and Nina Sirola of INSEAD, in their research paper published in the Academy of Management Journal.

In Pitesa and Sirola’s ‘Economic downturns undermine workplace helping by promoting a zero-sum construal of success’ paper, workplace helping is “essential to the success of organisations and economies” and in turn becomes even more pertinent during economic downturns.

So how can managers and employers avoid it?

Pitesa and Sirola recommend that managers build up a culture of cooperation and collectiveness, and reinforcing that culture during economic downturn, to guard against that zero-sum belief.

Managers could also restructure the organisation during economic downturns, by creating a formal interdependence among teams. That would help employees “maintain a view of their co-workers’ success as a personally desirable outcome”.

Furthermore, managers also need to “anticipate their individual employees’ sensitivity to cues of economic downturns”, and ensure that their employees’ reactions will not erode morale within the organisation.

Particularly in situations where layoffs are imminent, Pitesa and Sirola noted that managers tend to engage in less, instead of more, considerate treatment of employees.

“This should be avoided. Managers must be careful not to succumb in their interactions with employees to the stress that economic downturns impose, because such is likely to further aggravate the problematic consequences of downturns,” said the pair.

Pitesa and Sirola’s research arose from a study of the responses from nearly 60,000 people surveyed in the World Values Survey programme. They discovered that more people believed that “success is a zero-sum good” during unfavourable economic times.

The pair then tested the theory for workplace helping in two separate experiments, and found that professionals who had just read an article describing the US economy as declining were “less likely to offer to point a colleague in the right direction — even though it cost them nothing to do so — than peers who read an optimistic news article”.

Finally, Pitesa and Sirola conducted a field study by posing as the marketing department of a business school, and hired 101 freelance marketing and sales professionals from 47 different countries. The hires filled out paperwork that included questions on how they perceived the state of the economy in their home country, and then were tasked to evaluate the work of an intern who had devised a new slogan to promote university-branded merchandise.

The results of the field study showed that freelancers who felt negatively about the state of their home economy were more likely to decline, or write less, when they are given the option to offer helpful advice in their evaluations.

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