Crises bring out the best and worst in humanity

The worst workers are the ones who notice the worst in others. FOTOSEARCH

By SCOTT BELLOWS
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Summary

• The double standard put across by selfish employees is staggering. Staff who value equality and collective outcomes, what social scientists would consider prosocial individuals, were less likely to notice the workplace deviance in others. So, the worst workers are the ones who notice the worst in others.

As we look all around us as 2020 slowly barrels towards its close, we see staggering dichotomous examples of both selfishness and altruism. Crises bring out the best and the worst in humanity.

On the positive side with altruism, we see neighbours helping neighbours, friends raising funds through WhatsApp harambees for their friends’ medical bills, and we see families taking extra care and attention of their elderly relatives.

Further, frontline nurses, doctors, public health professionals, and teachers, among others, put their lives on the line with far greater risk than before the pandemic.

We see many of our Kenyan political leaders, though certainly not all, setting a good example for mask usage and social distancing during the pandemic unlike in several other nations.

We observe a thrilling case of altruistic transparency and ethics in the Ghanaian national elections.

On the contrary, we see selfishness permeating the corporate sector with many salary cuts in March and April before the economic effects of Covid-19 even had really hit profits. But as the economy slowly recovered, salaries were not brought back up commensurate with sales and profit increases.

Coronavirus got used as an excuse for all kinds of selfish corporate behaviours including settling scores, restructuring, and excessive layoffs.

Then organisations that upheld integrity for months while trying to pay staff full wages despite being in some of the most affected industries and only reducing their employees’ salaries or instituting layoffs once revenues had fallen to dangerously low levels, then many of their employees selfishly failed to appreciate the great positive efforts and strides while neglecting to compare their good companies to the actual bad entities who prematurely made similar cuts too early.

Selfishness in the public sector pricks our emotions with disdain for unfairness and impropriety.

We see theft or bureaucracy of personal protective equipment (PPE) resources destined to aid or protect Kenyans during the pandemic. Then we notice social distancing and caution thrown to the wind in some of the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) meetings.

We watch presidents selfishly try to cling to power in the United States, China, and Uganda.

We can praise the altruistic and grumble at the selfish. But what happens when the heights of selfishness occur within our own workplace organisation? Social scientists Alexandra Divincová and Bernadeta Siváková found selfishness can trigger psychological terror on innocent employees that result in great workers leaving organisations.

Research by Jiro Takaki, Toshiyo Taniguchi, and Yasuhito Fujii discovered that for employees to not become bothered and distressed over workplace selfishness, then they must feel and embrace jointly that their own contributions to the firm and accept that other people act inappropriately self-interested to achieve a sense of their own psychological job health.

Interesting research from Jan Luca Pletzer, Janneke Oostrom, and Sven Voelpel actually found that workers who are the most focused on selfish personal gains are in fact the ones who also notice and get disgruntled over the selfishness in their colleagues.

Workplace deviance

Those same selfish employees also report significantly higher levels of workplace deviance in others pointing out that their coworkers act fraudulently or violate rules, but selfishly will flaunt those same rules themselves.

The double standard put across by selfish employees is staggering. Staff who value equality and collective outcomes, what social scientists would consider prosocial individuals, were less likely to notice the workplace deviance in others. So, the worst workers are the ones who notice the worst in others.

What should companies do to reduce selfishness and the deviance that comes with it? Screen job applicants for individualist attitudes through interview responses in recalling past workplace situations.

Also, knowing that good equality-driven and collective-driven workers will not naturally notice selfishness and deviance, train all workers in what to watch out for and how to uncover deviance when going about their regular workdays.

Finally, instil a culture valuing worker contributions as a way to shield unselfish workers from the attacks of the most self-centred.

Dr Scott may be reached on scott@ScottProfessor.com or on Twitter: @ScottProfessor