The Growth Mindset at Work: Will Employees Help Others or Only Help Themselves?

Abstract

Organizations want employees to grow and develop their professional skills. Towards this aim, companies like Microsoft are turning to growth mindset interventions that increase employees’ belief in their developmental potential. But will embracing interventions that foster a strong self-development focus have unintended consequences and decrease employee efforts to help each other? We explore how growth mindset interventions impact other-oriented helping behavior using three experimental studies. A pilot study and Study 1 shows that a work-specific growth mindset intervention increases individuals’ intention to help their colleagues and helping behavior when compared to a control intervention. Study 2, a within-person field experiment utilizing a daily experience sampling approach, reveals that on days when employees participate in a work-specific growth mindset intervention (as compared to control), they engage in more helping and subsequently perceive greater prosocial impact and meaning in life. Further, these effects were stronger for those higher in trait-level growth mindset. Our findings suggest that the self-focused benefits of the growth mindset do not come at the cost of other helping behaviors that organizations also desire. We discuss the implications of our findings and the future of the growth mindset at work.