The Growth Mindset at Work: Will Employees Help Others to Develop Themselves?

Abstract

Organizations want employees to grow their skills, with companies like Microsoft embracing growth mindset interventions and policies to foster employee development. At the same time, organizations often seek to build collaborative cultures where employees frequently help one another. Thus, a question arises as to how growth mindsets impact other-directed behaviors, such as helping. To address this research question, we develop the concept of a work growth mindset –a mindset specific to growth opportunities at work– and we explore how it influences helping across a pilot study and five experimental studies. Study 1 (an online experiment) and Study 2 (a within-person field experiment) show that employees help coworkers more after participating in a work growth mindset intervention. Studies 3A-C explore the mechanisms underlying this relationship and the circumstances in which growth-oriented employees help others. These experiments show that a work growth mindset makes employees more other-oriented and likely to help, but that this effect relies on the extent to which the helping opportunities can be seen as enabling both self- and other-development, allowing for both the helper and the help recipient to grow. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and the future of the growth mindset at work.