Photo: iStock | Charday Penn
A university study finds that while research has shown loyal workers offer numerous benefits to employers, they tend to be exploited by being asked to do unpaid work and additional job tasks where less committed colleagues are not.
In the study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, nearly 1,400 managers were presented with various scenarios around a fictional 29-year-old employee named John. They were told John’s employer was looking to reduce expenses and asked to rate their willingness to assign John extra hours and duties without additional pay.
In all scenarios, the managers consistently gave John more work if he had a reputation for loyalty over those with reputations for other positive traits, like honesty or fairness. Furthermore, when managers read descriptions of John as open to extra hours and duties, they rated him as more loyal than alternate Johns with reputations for declining optional extra work.
“It’s a vicious cycle,” Matthew Stanley, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, said in a statement. “Loyal workers tend to get picked out for exploitation. And then when they do something that's exploitative, they end up getting a boost in their reputation as a loyal worker, making them more likely to get picked out in the future.”
Nonetheless, researchers concluded that the exploitation is likely not due to malicious intent but ignorance, or what psychologists call “ethical blindness.” Prof. Stanley likened it to how people known for other aspirational traits, like generosity, often get taken advantage of.
“Most people want to be good,” he said. “Yet, they transgress with surprising frequency in their everyday lives. A lot of it is due to ethical blindness, where people don’t see how their actions are inconsistent with whatever principles or values they profess.”
The study didn’t call on employees to abandon work commitments or outright refuse uncompensated overtime. Still, it said managers should be aware of the potential for exploitation.
“We value people who are loyal,” said Prof. Stanley. “We think about them in positive terms. They get awarded often. It's not just the negative side. It's really tricky and complex.”