Rethinking Positive versus Negative Reciprocity: Father Time Weighs In

• In Event: Employee Responses to Incentives

Abstract

Reciprocity has been shown to play a prominent role in the workplace, with employees rewarding their employer’s kindness (positive reciprocity) and punishing their employer’s unkindness (negative reciprocity). Conventional wisdom suggests that employees reciprocate negatively more strongly than they reciprocate positively. However, this understanding may be incomplete, as prior studies have focused on short-term settings that emphasize employees’ initial responses. In reality, employees often react to a single employer decision – whether kind (e.g., a wage increase) or unkind (e.g., wage decrease) – with multiple responses over time (e.g., effort throughout a year). Focusing on long-term settings, we predict and find that negative reciprocity is initially stronger than positive reciprocity, but also fades more over time than positive reciprocity. This fading is so pronounced in our setting that positive reciprocity is stronger overall in the long run. Thus, the negativity bias observed in prior studies may reverse in the long run, leading to a positivity bias.

Authors

• Jordan Samet, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

• Karl Schuhmacher, Emory University

• Kristy L Towry, Emory University

• Jacob Theodore Zureich, Emory University