Collaboration is well known to be a very trust based endeavor, and I wrote recently about research into whether we collaborate more when we act instinctively or deliberately.

The general gist was that when we have to think about collaborating, we tend to do less of it.  This tends to happen when the environment is not one that naturally encourages us to be collaborative.  So a recent study that explored whether we collaborate less during a recession is both interesting and timely.

Collaboration in a recession

The authors hypothesized that a harsh economic environment would contribute towards a more zero-sum attitude in the workplace.  In other words, people would take a more dog eat dog approach to life in the office, and think that helping others would be done at their own expense.

The researchers examined around 60,000 responses from the World Values Survey and found a clear correlation between the wider economy and a belief that success is ‘zero-sum’.

This was then fed into further experiments to test whether this manifested itself in visible behaviors.  One group of participants were primed to think negatively about the economy, before then being asked if they could help a colleague with something as simple as directions.  In other words, the help would not cost them anything, yet they did so less often than the control group.

A second study saw participants recruited to evaluate the work of an intern who had been working in the marketing team at a business school.  Alongside their analysis of the work, each recruit was asked to describe the economy in their home country.  As before, despite not knowing the intern who they were grading at all, those from poorly performing economies offered up less helpful feedback than those from flourishing economies.

In times of need

This is an important finding as organizations tend to need employees to pull together and support one another most when the economy is struggling.  Sadly, this study suggests that is the opposite of what happens.  What’s more, previous studies have suggested that these kind of economic circumstances can also prod bosses into being abusive, as employees felt less emboldened to stand up to such abuse.

So what can you do to improve matters?  The authors suggest that it’s during these times that managers need to place special emphasis on things such as community and cooperation.  They should stress that the goals of the organization can only be achieved by joint-effort to try and move people away from thinking just in terms of their own work.

With things like the Brexit move liable to cause a downturn in the economy, maybe now is the time for managers to start planning for just such an environment.