Give, take, or match? Styles of reciprocity, job satisfaction, and work motivation

• Published date: 01 July 2024
• Author: Nicola Belle,Paola Cantarelli
• Date: 01 July 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13731

SCHOLARLY TAKES

Give, take, or match? Styles of reciprocity, job satisfaction,

and work motivation

Nicola Belle | Paola Cantarelli

Management and Healthcare Laboratory,

Institute of Management, Scuola Superiore

Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy

Correspondence

Nicola Belle, Management and Healthcare

Laboratory, Institute of Management,

Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Via San Zeno 2,

56127 Pisa, Italy.

Email: nicola.belle@santannapisa.it

Abstract

In four online experiments involving 16,461 public professionals, weexamined the causal

effects of reciprocity styles at work on colleagues’expected job satisfaction and motiva-

tion. Our findings indicate that giving, which involves helping others when the benefit

outweighs personal cost, is the supervisory reciprocity style that maximizes expected sat-

isfaction among subordinates (Study 1). Additionally, it is expected that public employee

motivation will be highest when their supervisor or colleagues exhibit a giving reciproc-

ity style. Interestingly, the positive motivational effect of a giving peer is found to be rela-

tively larger than that of a giving supervisor (Study 2). Furthermore, the expected

motivation of current team members is enhanced by the prospect of a giver joining their

unit, while the arrival of a taker (someone who only helps if the benefits exceed personal

costs) reduces colleagues’motivation compared to the departure of a taker (Study 3).

Evidence for practice

•The reciprocity style of a public employee, whether they are a supervisor or a

peer, has a causal impact on the expected satisfaction and motivation of

coworkers, independent of leadership style and communication focus.

•Giving, which entails helping at work whenever the benefits to others are

greater than personal costs, is the reciprocity style that maximizes the expected

job satisfaction and motivation among subordinates and peers.

•In the realm of human resource management, public organizations should rec-

ognize reciprocity styles as a separate factor to consider alongside other ele-

ments like leadership styles and communication focus.

•The study of reciprocity styles at work contributes to the field of public adminis-

tration by aligning with a growing body of research that focuses on various

other-oriented motives and behaviors.

Every time we interact with another person at work,

we have a choice to make: do we try to claim as

much value as we can, or contribute value without

worrying about what we receive in return?

(Grant, 2013,p.4)

INTRODUCTION

A few years back, an article in The New York Times

Magazine titled “Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?”

popularized the benefits of a giving attitude at work. The

article featured Adam Grant’s book Give and Take:

A Revolutionary Approach to Success (Grant, 2013), which

portrays three types of individuals based on their primary

reciprocity style, that is, how they approach work interac-

tions with most people most of the time (Grant, 2013). As

of August 2023, the book has more than 650 citations on

Google Scholar and has received awards from Amazon,

Apple, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Oprah’s

riveting reads, Fortune,Harvard Business Review, and the

Washington Post (https://adamgrant.net/book/give-and-

take/). Building on equity sensitivity theory (Huseman

Received: 8 October 2022 Revised: 30 August 2023 Accepted: 1 September 2023

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13731

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribu tion and reproduction in any medium, provided the

original work is properly cited.

© 2023 The Authors. Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.

748 Public Admin Rev. 2024;84:748–763.

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar

et al., 1987), relational models (Fiske, 1992), and social

value orientations (Van Lange, 1999)—which are not new

to public administration scholars—Grant’s typology fea-

tures a bipartition between givers and takers, alongside a

mid-category he calls matchers. A giver is someone who is

willing to help at work whenever the benefit to others is

greater than the personal cost. Takers, on the other hand,

only engage in helping behaviors if the benefits to them

exceed the personal costs. Finally, matchers tend to operate

on the principle of reciprocity and seek even exchanges of

giving and taking in the workplace. It is important to note

that, although these three types are mutually exclusive and

collectively exhaustive, the same worker may engage in dif-

ferent reciprocity styles depending on the context of the

interaction. Nevertheless, Grant (2013)arguesthatmost

individuals tend to exhibit a predominant reciprocity style

in the workplace, which captures their general approach

toward most of the people most of the time.

Give and Take has generated unprecedented atten-

tion to the topic of other-oriented behaviors in the work-

place, which has drawn scholarship from both

mainstream management and public administration

(Grant, 2008; Wright & Grant, 2010). More specifically,

Grant’stypology—and the broader study of reciprocity

styles—did not go unnoticed in public administration,

where the prospects for research that is meaningful to

both scholars and practitioners seem worth exploring

(Bellé, 2013). In recent years, the study of other-oriented

motives and behaviors has experienced remarkable

growth within our field. As the most notable example,

“scholarly interest in public service motivation has

increased enormously”(p. 424) becoming at the same

time multidisciplinary (Ritz et al., 2016). Cognate

constructs have similarly garnered increased attention

among public administration scholars (Esteve et al.,

2016; Ritz et al., 2020;Schottetal.,2019). For example,

Steijn and Van der Voet (2019) provide insights into the

relationship between prosocial motivation and red tape

among Dutch child welfare professionals. Tepe and

Vanhuysse (2017) demonstrate that public administra-

tion students behave more altruistically and coopera-

tively than business and law students, after controlling

for their levels of public service motivation. Resh et al.

(2018) found that workers’identification with the mis-

sion of the public and nonprofit organizations they

belong to enhances their persistence in prosocial tasks.

Vogel and Willems (2020) show that a micro-intervention

that emphasizes employees’prosocial or societal impact

can positively affect their well-being, intention to stay in

the job and willingness to recommend their jobs to

others. Borry and Henderson (2020) demonstrate that

aspects of ethical climate are significantly related to pro-

social rule-breaking among emergency medical service

professionals. Work by Weißmüller et al. (2022)suggests

that individuals who score higher on public service moti-

vation are more likely to engage in prosocial rule-

breaking behavior. Moynihan et al. (2015)demonstrate

that work-related prosocial motivation predicts higher

subjective well-being, with the perceived social impact

being more important for happiness than the prosocial

desire to help. Bro et al. (2017) find that employees expe-

rience higher perceived impact on others and are more

user oriented in contexts with high citizen contact and

that the association between transformational leadership

and employee motivation depends on employees’per-

ceived impact. Piatak and Holt (2020) provide evidence

that both public service motivation and altruism have

separate predictive powers for prosocial behaviors, with

public service motivation displaying stronger consis-

tency as a predictor for specific prosocial behaviors when

compared to altruism. Despite the considerable growth

in this field, the study of reciprocity styles has been disre-

garded by scholars in public administration. Addressing

this research gap is crucial, considering the significant

role reciprocity styles play in social interactions within

government services and organizations. Public workers,

who regularly engage with a diverse range of stake-

holders including colleagues, supervisors, subordinates,

and the public, can greatly benefit from an examination

of how other-orientation influences these interactions.

Considering this, our research endeavors to make a

significant contribution to the investigation of reciprocity

styles both theoretically and empirically. Through our

efforts, not only we hope to generate new and innovative

insights within the realm of other-orientation in public

administration but we also attempt to have a broader

impact on the advancement of social science and related

disciplines. Our contribution may help bridge the trade

gap that typically exists between public administration

studies and other disciplines, such as mainstream man-

agement and psychology, by promoting interdisciplinary

collaboration and exchange of ideas.

With a few exceptions (Mäthner & Lanwehr, 2017), there

is a lack of work that integrates Grant’s typology into well-

established theories of altruistic behavior (see Bolino &

Grant, 2016). What is particularly surprising is that, to our

knowledge, no previous studies have explicitly linked

Grant’s framework to Simon’s work on the positive selection

of purely altruistic behavior (Simon, 1990,1992,1993). In

general, empirical evidence for the validity of Grant’sframe-

work is scant. Exceptions include the study of the relation-

ship between Grant’s reciprocity styles and information

sharing (Utz et al., 2014). To advance the scholarly debate

in this area, we put the styles of reciprocity port rayed in

Give and Take to an unprecedented experimental test that

aims at gauging the causal impact that a public employee’s

reciprocity style has on their colleagues’expected satisfac-

tion and motivation. This study may be especially valuable

for scholars and practitioners in public administration and

management, where the reliance on other-oriented behav-

iors is of primary relevance in sustaining job satisfaction

and work motivation (Cantarelli et al., 2016;Jensen

et al., 2019), as well as performance (Andersen et al., 2014;

Hassan et al., 2019;Moynihanetal.,2012).

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW 749