The research on economic well-being is compelling, but it also made me think of a couple fishing villages in Brazil. These villages were the subject of a research project that explored the impact of workplace organization on people’s tendency toward prosocial behaviors, and they were included in a fantastic TED talk by Dr. Jamil Zaki, the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He described the two villages:
One sits by the ocean, where fishing requires large boats and heavy equipment. To make a living there, fishermen must work together. The other sits by a lake, where fishermen strike out alone on small boats and compete with one another... Ocean fishermen trusted strangers and cooperated with their neighbors. Lake fishermen competed and mistrusted instead. But here’s the crazy part. These folks didn’t start out any different from each other, but the longer fishermen worked on the lake, the more they competed. The longer they worked on the ocean, the less they did.
The original research is from a 2014 study by Uri Gneezy, Andreas Leibbrandt, and John A. Lis of UC San Diego, Monash University, and the University of Chicago, respectively. The study involves asking the fishers to do resource allocation simulations designed to test how likely they are to trust (how many “points” they would put in the care of a stranger) and how often they are trustworthy (how many of the points entrusted to them they would return), among many other characteristics. Even after introducing control variables, the researchers found “large and significant differences in the level of trustworthiness between our two societies.” The sea fishers were not only more likely to trust strangers, but they were also more likely to uphold the trust put in them.
An employee-owned company is not necessarily more like ocean fishing, but it certainly has more reason to be. Like sea fishers, employee-owners work in teams and have aligned interests. Many of our member companies believe that teamwork and cooperation are essential features of the employee ownership performance advantage.
All of this recalls one of the finest speeches I have seen in my life: Corey Rosen’s closing comments at our annual conference in April (see a blog post or a video of his presentation). Corey argues that employee ownership can help address the catastrophic decline in measures of social trust in the country, and the data from the fishing villages suggests that he is right.
And in his TED Talk, Dr. Zaki translates his research into findings we all can use. In his own experiment, one group of people read an essay promoting empathy and another group read an essay that described empathy as a weakness. The two groups ended up with measurably different behavior and even measurably different levels of happiness. He concludes that “just reading one essay turned some of them into new optimists and others into new cynics.”
If that’s true for the impact of reading one essay, imagine the potential impact of your company’s ongoing workforce communication. The underlying themes in what we hear every day at work can help move us toward cynicism and doubt or toward optimism and trust.