DURHAM, N.C. – Company loyalty is a double-edged sword, according to a new study. Managers target loyal workers over less committed colleagues when doling out unpaid work and additional job tasks.
“Companies want loyal workers, and there is a ton of research showing that loyal workers provide all sorts of positive benefits to companies,” said Matthew Stanley, Ph.D., the lead researcher on the new paper and postdoctoral researcher at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. “But it seems like managers are apt to target them for exploitative practices.”
That’s the main conclusion from a series of experiments conducted by Stanley and his colleagues Chris Neck, Ph.D. and Chris Neck, father-and-son researchers at Arizona State University and West Virginia University, respectively.
The findings appeared online January 6 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
For the study, Stanley recruited nearly 1,400 managers online to read about a fictional 29-year-old employee named John. The managers all learned that John’s company was on a tight budget, and to keep costs down, had to decide how willi
