Want Employees Who Care About Helping? Design the Job So They Practice It

Most firms want employees who put customers and coworkers first. The usual approach is to hire for it. New research from Steven W. Rayburn, chair of the Department of Management, and Sidney T. Anderson and Jeremy J. Sierra of the Department of Marketing, with Luis García-Tello and Alejandro Fontana of the Universidad de Piura in Peru, points to a second option. The drive to help can be built through the way work is designed.

The paper’s title, “To do is to be,” states the idea. People learn who they are by watching what they do. An employee who helps others as a regular part of the job starts to see helping as part of their identity.

The study

The team ran three studies in three settings, each one repeating the last and adding to it.

The first surveyed 133 employees at a cooler manufacturer in the southern United States. Two things predicted prosocial motivation, the desire to benefit others at work. One was organizational citizenship behavior: voluntary acts such as helping a coworker or pitching in beyond the job description. The other was relatedness: feeling connected to the people you work with.

The second study surveyed 169 frontline employees at a hotel chain in Latin America. The same two paths held. It also added ethical climate, the shared sense that the organization expects people to do the right thing. Ethical climate predicted both helping behavior and connection.

The third study surveyed 1,162 employees at a construction services company in Latin America and tested the full model. It added empowerment and feedback as levers a manager controls.

What held across all three

Helping behavior and connection each raised prosocial motivation in every setting. That matters because the settings differ so much. Factory work is routine and mostly individual. Hotel work is team-based with constant customer contact. Construction services has less of both. The pattern did not depend on the work being inherently about helping people.

Ethical climate and empowerment both fed the two paths. Feedback did not. It was unrelated to either helping behavior or connection.

The surprise

The researchers expected ethical climate and empowerment to reinforce each other. They did not. Where the ethical climate was strong, empowerment added less. The authors suggest that employees in an ethical climate already feel free to do what is right, so formal empowerment has less left to contribute.

In practice, either lever alone was enough to prompt helping behavior. Of the two, the paper puts ethical climate first. Managers who want to empower employees, the authors write, should start by establishing a morally sound culture.

Putting it to work

The paper frames this as internal branding. Frontline employees turn a brand promise into a brand reality, and they do it through how they treat people. The authors offer several concrete steps:

• Write the ethical climate, empowerment, and helping into the mission, so that employee buy-in is not left to chance.
• Use ethics-based case studies in hiring packets and ongoing training.
• Give employees latitude to solve problems, along the lines of the empowerment model used by Ritz-Carlton.
• Hold short, regular team sessions, such as the daily lineup common in hotels, to reinforce why helping matters.

Limits

All data came from self-report surveys. Feedback was measured with two items, which may have been too coarse to detect feedback aimed specifically at helping or ethics. No single model can include every element of work design, so other levers remain untested.

What it means for managers

• Build helping into the work. Employees who regularly go beyond their role for coworkers come to see themselves as people who help.
• Invest in connection among coworkers. Feeling part of the group was a second, separate path to prosocial motivation.
• Start with ethical climate. Either an ethical climate or empowerment was enough to prompt helping behavior. Feedback on its own was not.

Rayburn, S. W., García-Tello, L., Anderson, S., Fontana, A., & Sierra, J. J. (2026). To do is to be: Workplace design to support employee prosocial motivation at the organizational frontline. European Journal of Marketing, 60(13), 175-201. 10.1108/EJM-02-2025-0166