The psychology of prosocial goals and employee happiness
Happiness is often one of the most important goals in a person’s life and prosocial or ‘giving attitudes’ have proven to be very effective in achieving it.
Often times, the list of ways a person can be prosocial or charitable is endless. How, as an organization, can you narrow down which most positively affects your employees? Although ‘employee happiness and engagement’ has been a rather loosely thrown around term in recent years, studies suggest that activities framed in concrete versus abstract terms make all the difference when it comes to having happy and engaged employees.
When it comes to business performance, all the evidence shows that happy and engaged employees far outperform and are more productive than unhappy ones. Similarly, there has been a great deal of research which highlights factors that lead to employee happiness. One of the crucial types of activities linked to employee engagement has been prosocial behaviour. The findings of this University of Zurich (UZH) study, “A Neural Link Between Generosity and Happiness,” were published online ahead of print July 11 in the journal Nature Communications. The study shows that small acts of generous behaviour cause the brain of the person giving to light up with a “warm glow” marked by increased levels of happiness. The brain imaging data also showed that Scrooge-ish people—who acted solely out of self-interest—were less happy and did not emit a warm glow in the fMRI.
Generous behaviour tends to put one’s own resources at risk, but standard economic theories and ‘finance gurus’ have failed to clearly explain what motivates giving behaviour since this is less profitable than knowing what motivates buying behaviour. Until recent years, organizations have given less time and attention to determining what makes their employees happy, even whilst being able to see direct correlations between employee dissatisfaction and productivity. A more distinct line has often been drawn between customer-facing employee engagement and sales.
‘Prosocial behaviour’ it seems, not only benefits the recipient but the giver as well; for example, a number of researchers have shown that those who engage in volunteer work have been associated with greater happiness and fewer symptoms of depression. The difference however, between strategic planning and reality in corporate social responsibility and charitable giving is whether the act of helping a person or group becomes a source of happiness or unhappiness for the employee being drafted in to contribute. In other words, when the givers take on a largely abstract goal, it becomes easy to frustrate and disappoint employees when that goal appears to not have been accomplished.
Research suggests that simply framing prosocial goals in more concrete and achievable terms can lead to much greater satisfaction among employees and thus a more sustainable pattern of prosocial behaviour, until the company becomes known for its efforts. Employees and even customers engage better when happy, so naturally it is with great interest that every leader should desire to know whether their employees are genuinely happy and engaged.
In other words, money can buy happiness, so long as you spend the money on someone else! Understanding this, leaders could support the happiness of their employees by encouraging them to make charitable donations to, for example, a particular charity that their organization may have chosen to support.
As for the science of it all, the abovementioned neuroscience study proved that even small amounts of generosity and kindness light up the brain using fMRI. Until now, human neuroimaging studies haven’t investigated brain areas associated with generous behaviour and happiness simultaneously. Economists were keen on specifically identifying just how much or what degree of generosity was necessary to light up someone’s brain. Before the experiment began, some participants were asked to verbally commit to be generous with others. As part of the game, this group was also asked to accept slightly higher costs in order to do something nice for someone else. The control group was given instructions to self-deal and behave generously only towards themselves and to be stingy with everybody else. Then, all study participants were given a “slush fund” of money that they could spend on someone else or spend on themselves.
Throughout various aspects of this experiment, a series of decisions were made concerning generous or selfish behaviours as participants were observed in the fMRI. The researchers were able to pinpoint specific brain areas that lit up during times of generosity. Altruism and overcoming egocentricity bias have previously been correlated with functional activity and structural properties of the temporoparietal junction (TPJ). As would be expected, the TPJ lit up when people displayed prosocial behaviours and generosity by giving to others during the game. Reward- related brain areas such as the ventral striatum and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) are correlated with feeling good and also lit up when someone was being generous.
One of the most surprising aspects of this study is that the amount of generosity did not correlate directly with the degree of someone’s happiness or contentment. Very small amounts of generous behaviour could elicit the warm glow of feeling happy. Interestingly, the researchers also found that simply making a verbal commitment to behave more generously in the future activated altruistic areas of the brain and intensified the warm glow within brain areas associated with positive emotions.
These findings can have a big impact on employees when strategic goals for corporate social responsibility are framed in concrete terms. Some examples include IBM’s programme “Celebration of Service” that allows employees to volunteer to extend social good to societal issues and managed to log over 300,000 hours. Verizon matches employee donations to various organizations 1:1 and also encourages employees to volunteer. Tom’s “One for One” gives a number of its products to children in need which its employees travel and deliver year round. There is opportunity here to also apply these results to other areas of the business such as marketing and advertising when they targets personal goals of a consumer (for example Coca Cola’s “Have a coke and smile”).
When applied to employees and engagement, organizations don’t need to shell out hundreds of thousands in non- impactful donations. What becomes more important and beneficial to the company, and by extension the happiness of its employees, are clear and meaningful acts of generosity. Delivering on social responsibility plans that are concrete, simple and easy to measure creates the ultimate win-win. We know that civil society benefits when all of us are cooperative and generous in some way, but it’s also nice to have evidence that reminds us all that even the most miniscule amounts of day-to-day prosocial behaviour and giving attitudes can trigger neurobiological changes in the brain that are clinically proven to increase happiness and contentment. After all, isn’t happiness what we all search for?