Pressuring employees to be do-gooders can backfire badly

“Being required to do good meant that they subsequently felt licensed to bend the rules” By Alex Fradera Most employers like their workers to think of themselves not as employees but as “citizens” of the organisation, proactively engaging in activities like helping others out or coming up with company improvements – activities that aren’t specified in a job description yet help the organisation thrive. But more and more, these supposedly discretional citizenship behaviours are being demanded by managers more overtly – outlined in ‘The Way We Work’ documents, or threatened informally as necessary to get ahead. Now an article in the Academy of Management Journal suggests being forced to be a good citizen has some perverse consequences: when you’re grudgingly good, you become blasé about doing bad. Kai Chi Yam’s international team started their investigations by canvassing teams of mainly male workers spread across organisations in industries including banking, telecommunications and manufacturing. They asked managers of the 345 participants to estimate how much they engaged in citizenship behaviours – e.g. “initiates assistance to coworkers who have a heavy workload” – and then asked the participants themselves the reasons why they would do these sorts of things, with some of the reasons pointing towards top-down coercion (“I’ll get in trouble if I don’t”). Yam found that participants who performed more citizenship behaviours due...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Morality Occupational Source Type: blogs