Do-Gooders Are Unpopular Team Members

Unselfish workers who are the first to offer to help with projects are among those that co-workers like the least, according to four separate social psychology studies.

In the most recent study, entitled “The Desire to Expel Unselfish Members from the Group,” psychologists found that unselfish colleagues come to be resented because they “raise the bar” for what’s expected of everyone. As a result, workers feel the new standard will make everyone else look bad.

“It doesn’t matter that the overall welfare of the group or the task at hand is better served by someone’s unselfish behavior. What is objectively good, you see as subjectively bad,” said study co-author Craig Parks of Washington State University. The paper was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Participants—undergraduate psychology students—were asked to play a game over a computer network with four other students. These players were actually just a part of a computer program.

The experiment was initially designed to study the expected social exclusion of cheats, but the unselfish player was put in as a control.

After the game was over, participants were asked who they would like to play with again. Most participants later said they would not want to work with the greedy colleague again—an expected result seen in previous studies.

An unexpected result was the fact that a majority of participants also said they would not want to work with the unselfish colleague again. They frequently said, “the person is making me look bad” or is breaking the rules. Occasionally, they would suspect the person had ulterior motives.

For more on how colleagues relate to each other, click here for the full story from Wired.com.