An employee of the company asks a colleague for help. What is the probability that he will respond to this request? In many cases, this depends on the position of both employees in the corporate hierarchy – it turned out that we are less willing to help colleagues who are close in status: after all, they pose a certain threat to us.
American management specialists from the business college. Fisher at Ohio State University (USA) conducted two studies to find out in which situations colleagues are more likely to help each other.
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The first study involved 267 students who were asked to imagine themselves as members of a team of 15 people in a large sales organization. One of the colleagues is close to making a big deal, but he doesn’t have enough time and he asks for help. Is the member willing to help? At the same time, the students were given various information about what position in the organization they “occupy” both themselves and the mentioned colleague. In various scenarios, the participant and his colleague were approximately equal in status, very different in status, or were at an average distance from each other in the firm’s hierarchy. It turned out that students were most often ready to help a colleague who was not too far from them, but not too close in status either.
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The second study was conducted among employees of a real call center who called customers and tried to close deals. Every month, each employee was emailed a list of sales figures for all employees. Thus, they all knew their position in the hierarchy.
Although the workplaces were separated by partitions, helping each other was encouraged, often the employee asked the client to wait until he clarified the answer to some question from a colleague.
The researchers asked 170 employees of this call center to answer a series of questions via the Internet. In particular, each of them was asked to make lists of those colleagues who most often turned to them for help, and those whom they themselves usually asked for help when needed.
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Comparing these lists with the sales hierarchy, the researchers found the same pattern — employees were most willing to help those colleagues who were not too far away, but not too close to them in status.
“Colleagues close to you in status pose a certain threat to you. By helping them, you risk that they will overtake you in the hierarchy or simply take your time and effort, slowing down your own progress, ”says one of the authors of the study, Sarah Doyle (Sarah Doyle). Helping those who are very different from you in status is also likely to require a lot of time and effort, which may suffer from your own results. But helping colleagues who are at a middle distance from us in the hierarchy does not pose a particular threat and provides an excellent opportunity to show our willingness to cooperate with others.
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These results do not mean that employees often refused to help the “wrong” colleagues. “We found that the majority of employees are willing to help colleagues. It’s not that they refuse help, but that some of their colleagues are more willing to help and are willing to put more effort into this, ”explains study co-author Robert Lount (Robert Lount).
Подробнее см. S. Doyle et al. «Helping Others Most When They’re Not Too Close: Status Distance as a Determinant of Interpersonal Helping in Organizations», Academy of Management Discoveries, November 2015.