Every day, employees make decisions about whether to act like givers or like takers. When they act like givers, they contribute to others without seeking anything in return. They might offer assistance, share knowledge, or make valuable introductions. When they act like takers, they try to get other people to serve their ends while carefully guarding their own expertise and time.
Organizations have a strong interest in fostering giving behavior. A willingness to help others achieve their goals lies at the heart of effective collaboration, innovation, quality improvement, and service excellence. In workplaces where such behavior becomes the norm, the benefits multiply quickly.
But even as leaders recognize the importance of generous behavior and call for more of it, workers receive mixed messages about the advisability of acting in the interests of others. As a matter of fact, various situations put employees against one another, encouraging them to undercut rather than support their colleagues’ efforts. Even without a dog-eat-dog scoring system, strict delineation of responsibilities and a focus on individual performance metrics can cause a "not my job" mentality to take hold.
As employees look around their organizations for models of success, they encounter further reasons to be wary of generosity. A study by the Stanford professor Frank Flynn highlighted this problem. When he examined patterns of favor exchange among the engineers in one company, he found that the least- productive engineers were givers-workers who had done many more favors for others than they’d received. I made a similar discovery in a study of salespeople: The ones who generated the least revenue reported a particularly strong concern for helping others.
This creates a challenge for managers. Can they promote generosity without cutting into productivity and undermining fairness How can they avoid creating situations where already-generous people give away too much of their attention while selfish coworkers feel they have even more license to take How, in short, can they protect good people from being treated like doormats
Part of the solution must involve targeting the takers in the organization-providing incentives for them to collaborate and establishing repercussions for refusing reasonable requests. But even more important, my research suggests, is helping the givers act on their generous impulses more productively. The key is for employees to gain a more subtle understanding of what generosity is and is not. Givers are better positioned to succeed when they distinguish generosity from three other attributes-timidity, availability, and empathy-that tend to travel with it. According to the author, givers are characterized by being ______.