Christmas is approaching fast, shops are slowly preparing festive collections, and you are looking forward to your well-deserved bonuses from work, which will mostly be spent on gifts. How would you react if your company decided on a minor change of strategy this year, and your bonus would be donated to charity or to your co-workers? We can only speculate on the kind of backlash this event would raise. However, research discussed on the Business 2 Community website implies something entirely different - giving up bonuses for the benefit of someone else leads to higher satisfaction, and can even improve job performance too!
The research was conducted in several phases aiming to prove a link between happiness, performance and prosocial behavior. In the first case, financial vouchers for charitable purposes were handed out to the experimental group, while the control group received nothing. The result was an increase in satisfaction among those who received a voucher, unlike the results of the control group, where satisfaction stayed unchanged.
The next phase was conducted in a similar way, when one sports team had to distribute its money among the teammates, while the other team had to spend it individually. The big surprise was a significant performance increase in the prosocially acting team, the results of which calculate that with every $10 donated to teammates, there was an 11 % percent increase in the resulting percentage. On the other hand, with every $10 spent on their own needs, performance decreased by 2%.
What is the impact of this study in the corporate environment? Of course, the research has focused on this situation, and applied the same approach as in the second phase in the example of the sales department of a pharmaceutical company. It is not surprising that it ended with similarly interesting results. When calculating the return on investment, the company got a mere $3 back for every $10 spent individually. However, for every $10 invested prosocially, the company got the entire $52 in revenue!
Research suggests that personal bonuses for employees in this case do not increase sales. This issue falls to a growing number of evidence that prosocial behavior brings positive results for those who are engaged. Thus, managers get another tool for improving the performance and satisfaction of their employees.
-bn-