Seeking to Belong: How the Words of Internal and External Beneficiaries Influence Performance

Paul Isaac Green,Bradley R Staats

doi:10.5465/ambpp.2017.17184abstract

Paul Isaac Green, Bradley R Staats

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.5465/ambpp.2017.17184abstract

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Abstract

Theories of relational motivation provide evidence that beneficiary contact can enhance prosocial motivation in jobs high in significance by influencing employees’ perceived impact on these beneficiaries. This body of work generally focuses on service functions, or contexts in which the beneficiaries directly benefit from the employee’s work. Our study builds on these theories, suggesting that in contexts where the benefits to customers are indirect and distant, contact with internal beneficiaries can lead to increases in prosocial motivation by enhancing employees’ sense of belongingness. Our study leverages the insight that employees are seeking to belong–and seek to enhance their sense of belongingness in work settings. We find, in a longitudinal field experiment of fruit harvesters, that though beneficiary contact with the overall customer did not significantly improve productivity, contact with an internal beneficiary that made connectedness salient yielded a persistent increase in productivity relative to a control group.

Highlights

The American short story, “The Man Without a Country”, by Edward Everett Hale, set in the early 19th century, tells the fictional tale of Army lieutenant Philip Nolan (Hale, 1918)
We propose that organizations can leverage this drive, creating opportunities through small interventions, for employees to interact with others with whom they have, or seek to have, a belongingness relationship—and in doing so, increase motivation to perform to the benefit of other employees in interdependent functions
Our work extends the growing relational job design literature (Morgeson and Campion, 2003; Grant, 2007; Grant and Parker, 2009)—and the expansive work motivation literature, more generally (Hackman and Oldham, 1980; Mitchell and Daniels, 2003; Latham and Pinder, 2005)—by showing one important path by which interactions with others can lead to increases in performance, even in job domains where the impact on beneficiaries is distant or abstract

Summary

Introduction

The American short story, “The Man Without a Country”, by Edward Everett Hale, set in the early 19th century, tells the fictional tale of Army lieutenant Philip Nolan (Hale, 1918). RELATIONAL JOB DESIGN AND SOCIAL IMPACT Recent advances in the examination of the motivational potential of job characteristics suggest that interaction with the beneficiaries of one’s work can enhance the worker’s perception of their work’s significance, leading to an increase in prosocial motivation to the benefit of those beneficiaries (Grant, 2007; Grant et al, 2007; Grant, 2008a, 2008b).

Results

Conclusion