Undergraduate thesis: Benevolence is more favoured than integrity and ability in collaboration

Integration and connectedness are keys to organizational development, along with data-driven decision-making and an intelligent network. To compensate for the transformational changes, most of the human resources departments claim their fondness for the situation by reforming their framework into collaboration and collegiality settings. Those variables are believed to make everything more efficient, convenient, and friendly towards informational uncertainty.

Earlier, cooperation was all we needed, but now it could not be enough. Working behavior has changed and revolved around something more than just cooperation. According to Sharpe, Lounsbery, and Templin (1997), we could never only depend on cooperative behavior because we needed collegiality and collaboration to make things work. They stated that collegiality was needed to ensure that the task had been distributed equally, while collaboration was important to contextualize mutual respect, trust, and honesty in the team.

Nevertheless, there might be situations that are far from ideal. For example, teams are vulnerable to free riders, a phenomenon of social loafing that causes injustice in task distribution due to a lack of responsibility among some people. Within the situation, you still have the duty to fill yourself with those out-of-your-education skills set as the aftereffect of collaboration and stand out in the cross-functional team to achieve daily goals. While you have all the problems by yourself, you are still required to develop prosocial behavior at your office. Have you ever been there and decided to quit your job?

If you say yes, probably your fairness sense was working better than your earlier generations. Generally speaking, people uphold benevolence through the quality of their fairness and prosocial behavior. Fairness is a sense of equity and equality shown in the way people negotiate and handle task distribution with colleagues. Further, prosocial behavior is an act of helping behavior that affects self-worth. By helping people and carefully addressing their needs, you will be respected as a kind and trustworthy person. Imagine if you were engaged with free riders. What emotions might come to mind?

To prove the assumptions of prosocial behavior in collaboration, I made a vignette for my undergraduate thesis that consisted of a situation in which the participants had to decide whether they would continue to collaborate with a selfless (helper trait without ulterior motives) or selfish (helper trait with ulterior motives) trait randomly. When integrity and ability were all good, they still refused to work with a selfish person. Why were integrity and ability not enough? What is the reason behind this?

Theoretically, in the frame of humans as social beings, perceived benevolence contributes to collaboration through the potentiality of friendships (Chung, Lount, Park, & Park, 2018). From the perspective of interpersonal relationships, friendships tend to increase commitment, motivation, satisfaction, and socialization in collaboration (Winstead, Derlega, Montgomery, & Pilkington, 1995). Furthermore, Polterovich (2017) also mentioned that prosocial behavior is considered an important factor in increasing individual involvement in collaboration. The theory suggests that benevolence in the form of prosocial behavior is the basis of social interactions.

Practically, most people do not befriend their colleagues in the sense of close relationships. Working environments shape people to behave in transactional relationships, so giving vulnerability to colleagues is quite risky and strange. The research may imply a situation where the working environments are unknown. In those situations, people use their basic instincts and interact as socially as possible, hoping that someone will be kind enough to them. In other words, they prefer to work with someone who is kind rather than competent and honest in clueless situations to keep off social uncertainty.

Benevolence can be a positive trait for newcomers, but integrity and ability are the variables that are highly valued by your employer. Some talent management does not measure performance based on your sociability and how comfortable you are with each other. Benevolence is for your convenience, but ability and integrity are ones that you can depend on for working performance.

Still, if you are too kind, you are vulnerable to being used by opportunists. This situation suggests benevolence in mutualistic situations. Benevolence is related to fairness-sensing; if you manage to be ignorant and care at the right amount, you will sense fairness better than before. Further, if benevolence does not interact with integrity, it could end in communal deceptions. Please carefully adjust your benevolence, integrity, and ability to be a trustworthy employee.

References

• Chung, S., Lount Jr, R. B., Park, H. M., & Park, E. S. (2018). Friends With Performance Benefits: A Meta-Analysis on the Relationship Between Friendship and Group Performance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(1), 63-79.
• Polterovich, V. (2017). Positive collaboration: Factors and mechanisms of evolution. Russian Journal of Economics, 3(1), 24-41.
• Sharpe, T., Lounsbery, M., & Templin, T. (1997). Cooperation, collegiality, and collaboration: Reinforcing the scholar-practitioner model. Quest, 49(2), 214-228.
• Winstead, B. A., Derlega, V. J., Montgomery, M. J., & Pilkington, C. (1995). The quality of friendships at work and job satisfaction. Journal of social and personal relationships, 12(2), 199-215.