All of this might lead a manager to
contemplate hiring job candidates based
upon their degree of guilt proneness.
Flynn says that a reliable guilt proneness
assessment tool for business use hasn’t
yet been developed, “though I know some
companies are keen on figuring it out.”
But Flynn cautions against trying to
alter workers’ existing tendencies in
an effort to make them feel more guilt.
“Clearly, we want to get a handle upon
who these highly guilt-prone people are,
because they’re outstanding employees,”
he says. “But we don’t want to try creating
them from scratch.” Trying to make
employees feel guilty about missing work
could backfire and trigger reactance, in
which they resist the manipulation. “People
don’t like having a guilt trip placed on
them,” he observes.
Instead, Schaumberg hopes that the
insights from the research eventually will
lead to managers being more cognizant of
the psychological diversity of individuals
in their workforce. “If we better understand
a person’s qualities, we can better create
an environment in which the person can
thrive,” she says. Δ
Francis J. Flynn is the Paul E.
Holden Professor of Organizational
Behavior at Stanford GSB.
Instead, Schaumberg and her colleague
Francis J. Flynn, the Paul E. Holden
Professor of Organizational Behavior at
Stanford GSB, have documented the
surprising power of another motivating
factor — the guilt people feel when they
don’t fulfill someone else’s expectations.
ASSESSING “GUILT
PRONENESS”
In a paper (“Clarifying the Link Between
Job Satisfaction and Absenteeism: The
Role of Guilt Proneness”) published last
year in the Journal of Applied Psychology,
Schaumberg and Flynn studied a
sample of 334 customer service agents
at seven different call centers for a major
telecommunications company in the
southwestern U.S. The subjects took an
online survey in which they expressed
how they felt about their jobs, and then
also took a test designed to assess their
“guilt proneness,” or their tendency to
experience negative feelings about personal
wrongdoing. After that, the researchers
analyzed four months’ worth of the
workers’ attendance records, provided by
the company.
Schaumberg and Flynn found that
for workers who had a low degree of guilt
proneness, job satisfaction was negatively
related to absenteeism — that is, if they
were happy with their work, they tended to
show up. In contrast, job satisfaction was
unrelated to absenteeism for highly guilt-prone employees.
“People who have guilt proneness show
up even if they don’t like their job as much,”
Flynn says.
That finding was bolstered by a second
survey, in which Schaumberg and Flynn
studied 227 workers in a range of industries
from agriculture to entertainment
and got similar results. In addition,
“Guilt is good.
It actually has
a lot in common
with positive
emotions.”
the researchers also measured two other
qualities — agreeableness and moral
identity — and found that these traits
influenced absenteeism in a fashion
similar to guilt proneness. As they write in
their paper, those results “further support
our theorizing that the relationship
between job satisfaction and absenteeism
depends upon the extent to which a person
is motivated by filling others’ normative
expectations, as opposed to fulfilling one’s
own immediate interests.”
IT’S NOT ABOUT
DISAPPOINTING
A PARTICULAR PERSON
The researchers didn’t try to determine who
it was that the highly guilt-prone workers
were so worried about not disappointing. As
Schaumberg explains, that can vary from
person to person and situation to situation.
“It’s more the tendency to feel guilt
that’s important,” she says. “The person
will anticipate guilt for failing to fulfill
the expectations of others by not doing
something they should have done. But it’s
not a tendency to feel guilty to colleagues
or family or a husband or spouse. It’s
generalized.”
A propensity for experiencing guilt
might seem like a painful psychological
affliction. But as Flynn explains, it actually
can be a plus in the workplace. Previous
studies by Schaumberg and Flynn have
found that highly guilt-prone individuals
have a higher degree of commitment to
organizations and are routinely rated in
performance reviews as being more capable
leaders than counterparts who are less
prone to feeling guilty.
“Guilt is good,” Flynn says. “It actually
has a lot in common with positive
emotions.”
DISTINGUISHING GUILT
FROM SHAME
Flynn says that it’s important to
differentiate guilt from shame, a bad feeling
that’s focused upon oneself as a person,
rather than an act. Shame generally has
detrimental effects and can cause a worker
to withdraw or lash out against others.
A guilt-prone person, in contrast, would
strive to deal with a problem that they’ve
caused and undo the harm to others — or
avoid committing another transgression.
