Give, match, or take: A new personality construct predicts resource and information sharing
Introduction
Psychologists have long been interested in factors that influence how people cooperate or compete with others as these factors have widespread implications for a variety of social contexts. In 2013, Adam Grant’s book “Give and Take”, which focuses on interpersonal interaction styles and professional success, became a bestseller; it was one of the most recommended business books. Grant distinguishes between givers, takers, and matchers and claims that these ways of approaching social interactions affect how people behave in their professional life. Givers are people who are always ready to support others without expecting anything in return. Takers try to get as much out of an interaction as they can, and matchers act according to a tit-for-tat strategy.
At first glance, this new personality construct has similarities with the established construct social value orientation (SVO; Van Lange, Otten, De Bruin, & Joireman, 1997). Within the SVO framework, individuals are distinguished as prosocials, individualists and competitors. Although the conceptualizations appear to have similarities (e.g., givers and prosocials aim to help others obtain good outcomes), the nature of the measures differs. SVOs are usually measured by decomposed games, that is, abstract and decontextualized situations in which the respondents decide the distribution of points between themselves and an unknown other. The Give & Take (G&T) measure, however, is comprised of rich contextualized scenarios and three contextualized behavioral options. Is the contextualized measure G&T a better predictor of behavior than the more decontextualized SVOs? This is the central question of this paper. Our main focus lies on sharing behavior in mixed-motive situations. We examine the effects of G&T and SVO on sharing resources using a traditional public goods dilemma (Dawes, 1980) and an information sharing task (Steinel, Utz, & Koning, 2010). In contrast to resources, information is not lost when it is shared. Nevertheless, people often keep important private information for themselves. Both behaviors, sharing resources and sharing information, are relevant especially in professional contexts and should thus be predicted by G&T.
Section snippets
Give & Take
Grant (2013, p. 5) describes giving, taking, and matching as “three fundamental styles of social interaction”. Although the styles may vary among different contexts, he argues that most people develop a primary style in professional contexts. Takers take more than they give, givers give more than they take, and matchers give as much as they take. This theoretical framework is based partially upon equity sensitivity theory (Miles, Hatfield, & Huseman, 1989), which classifies individuals as
Social value orientations
SVOs are considered as relatively stable personal dispositions that describe the preference for certain outcome distributions. Usually, prosocials, individualists and competitors are distinguished (Van Lange et al., 1997). Prosocials strive to maximize the joint profit and aim for equality in outcomes. Individualists maximize their own profit in absolute terms, whereas competitors maximize their own profit in relative terms (Van Lange, 1999, Van Lange et al., 1997). Over decades, it has been
Comparison of the measures
The G&T measure consists of highly contextualized information (with the exception of a first scenario that requires a choice between outcome distributions). Most scenarios are situated in a professional context, and contain information about the situation as well as the interaction partner (e.g., a colleague, your boss’s boss). The behavioral options are also richer than just the distribution between outcomes, for example, taking responsibility for a boring task or introducing a colleague’s
Participants
Data for this study were collected via a German online panel (Göritz, 2014) across two time points. In the first wave, 1560 people participated (57.8% women), with a mean age of 47 (SD = 11) years. In the second wave, 1231 participants returned, with a similar age and gender distribution (79% retention). Only 9.5% had a low education level (9 years of school or less), 52.6% had an O/A-level education and 37.9% had higher education. All participants completed the study voluntarily and without
Descriptive statistics
Table 1 provides means, standard deviations, and intercorrelations for the independent measures and Table 2 for the dependent measures. The three subtypes of G&T all correlated negatively, suggesting that as individuals identify with one style (giving, matching, or taking), they are less likely to identify with either of the other two styles. G&T scores were correlated with SVO. Specifically, giver scores were positively related to prosocial scores and taker scores were positively related to
Discussion
This study examined the properties of the newly developed G&T measure. We found significant correlations with SVO, self- and other-orientation, reciprocity and narcissism, thereby demonstrating G&T’s convergent validity. However, these correlations were small to moderate, indicating that G&T taps into a different component. This holds especially for the matching scale. G&T was a better predictor of behavior than SVO, especially when it came to information sharing.
The correspondence principle (
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