Employee giving = desirable business outcomes. Increase productivity, higher profitability, efficiency, and customer satisfaction, lower costs, lower turnover rates.
It is straightforward; when people only give something to others when they are sure they will get something in return, they behave selfishly. If we know we can be helpful and don’t do it because they think this person is a taker, then we don’t change the more significant systemic problem: Everyone is focused on themselves. In the multistakeholder economy we live in today, more people should go from ego to echo and move away from being focused on themselves, starting focusing on the networks that share the same intentions. We should be focusing on building relationships. A meta-analysis from the University of Arizona, led by Nathan Podsakoff, investigated thirty-eight organizational behavior studies, representing more than 3,500 business units from different industries. They found a robust correlation between employee giving and desirable business outcomes. Giving predicts a unit’s increase in productivity, higher profitability, efficiency, and customer satisfaction, along with lower costs and turnover rates. As mentioned in the Harvard Business Review article “In the Company of Givers” by Curt Nickisch, “Generosity can be guided in the direction of greatest impact.”
Podsakoff, Nathan P., Steven W. Whiting, Philip Podsakoff, and Brian D. Blume. “Individual- and Organizational-Level Consequences of Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Applied Psychology 94, no. 1 (January 2019): 122–41.
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