We have all experienced the pain of being treated unfairly. It could be that we’ve been overlooked in favor of someone less deserving in a romantic context. Maybe at work, we slaved hard on a project but someone who did almost nothing ends up receiving most of the credit. In either case, we may feel that our decision to not act selfishly costed us dearly. Incidents like these raise the question in every giving person’s mind: how can I remain true to who I am as a giver and still find some measure of success in life? This is the question which occupied Adam Grant. His book, Give and Take (2013), is the result.

Grant, an organizational psychologist, is the youngest tenured professor in The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and has received numerous awards for his teaching and research. But he was not always this successful. In his first job selling advertisements for a travel guide company, he was tasked with persuading old clients to renew their subscriptions. But when he contacted the clients, he empathized so much with their complaints that he violated the company’s contract to offer them discounts instead. He even gave money back to one client who demanded a refund.

His giving nature caused him to lose revenue for the company. This, however, changed when an assistant manager, whose new job helped her pay for her education, was hired. He realized then that he had colleagues who were depending on him and he could no longer act like a doormat.

These experiences led Grant to devote the early stages of his academic career to investigate the relationship between giving and success in the workplace. To present his findings, he places human interactions on a reciprocity spectrum of giving and taking. On this spectrum, most people remain at the center and adopt a matching reciprocity style. In other words, ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’. Likewise, some people adopt a predominantly giving style and others adopt a predominantly taking style.

Grant writes that in all the organizations he has researched, givers, i.e., those who adopted a predominantly giving style, were overrepresented among the most successful and the least successful, success being measured by their position in the organization. The givers who were the least successful were helping others so indiscriminately that they hampered their own productivity. They also suffered at the hands of takers who would not reciprocate their kindness.

Takers tended to rise quickly and fall quickly. Their downfall was primarily caused by matchers, who, believing in a just world, punished the takers by sharing negative reputational information about them. Finally, some givers were likely to experience success, in part, because they tended to be rewarded by matchers.

Grant notes that the givers who experienced success, unlike the ones who don’t, accurately identified takers and shifted their reciprocity style to a matching mode with them. However, it is hard to apply this advice because identifying takers reliably is not easy. Part of the difficulty lies in the trait of agreeableness. Agreeable people, who are pleasant to interact with, are just as likely to be takers as disagreeable people. To illustrate, agreeable takers are the ones who smile to your face and then stab you in the back. Jeffrey Skilling of Enron scandal fame is one example. Disagreeable givers might be abrasive toward you but will also offer you invaluable advice and help. Gregory House of House M.D. fame is one fictional example.

To find out more about identifying the reciprocity styles of others, read his book. 

Grant also lists the many advantages of adopting a giving mindset by citing anecdotal evidence from diverse sources. He uses the NBA (National Basketball Association) draft decisions made in the 1980s to show why the basketball coach Stu Inman, a giver, could avoid the common trap of escalating his commitment to a losing course of action and move on when his early draft picks could not perform.

Escalation happens when people who make an initial investment of time, energy, or resources in something choose to increase their investment after it goes sour. Behavioral economists refer to this as the sunk cost fallacy. Research has shown that the greatest cause of escalation is ego threat. By investing more in what is clearly a sinking ship, people who are driven by ego threat hope to turn things around and hide their failure a little longer so that they can prove to others and themselves that they were right all along.

Givers are less likely to escalate their commitment because they are concerned with protecting others from the consequences of their actions. They are therefore more likely to act in the interests of the company and the people who rely on them rather than their own. As a result, they become more trusted by their peers and superiors and achieve more success.

There is much to commend this book. It’s easy to read and is bolstered by a lot of social-scientific research. But the flimsy nature of the relationship between academic research and workplace realities, especially when they relate to amorphous human organizational practices, means that the reader needs to assess each of Grant’s conclusions with some caution and nuance.

For instance, while he identifies individuals as givers, takers, and matchers, he also acknowledges that people adopt different reciprocity styles in diverse contexts. You could be a giver at home, a matcher at work, and a taker among friends. This complicates the stable tripartite world that Grant sometimes implicitly assumes for the sake of his conclusions about who succeeds. The home, workplace, and socializing spaces aren’t demarcated.

He also acknowledges that in domains like politics, givers rarely succeed. Sophisticated versions of the Prisoner’s Dilemma in Game theory extrapolated to human enterprise predict that, under certain circumstances, adopting a relentless matching or taking reciprocity style yields the greatest success, even if the success may be short-lived. Therefore, it isn’t clear that giving will always be the likeliest path to success, or that certain kinds of successes are intrinsically desirable goals for givers since true givers give without the expectation of return.

Grant does not engage with the issue of self-awareness as much as he could have either. Because of the better-than-average effect, some people who think they are very giving aren’t seen that way by anybody else. While he does mention taking a survey to ascertain where we are on the reciprocity spectrum, he should have emphasized the value of getting regular external feedback more. Otherwise, the book may devolve into a feel-good manifesto for self-identified givers and not be an effective motivator for anybody to change their behavior.

The concept of success also requires some clarification. Grant wishes to partially define success as the contribution to the success of others in the workplace. But even though it’s helpful to not see the world as zero-sum, it is zero-sum in many ways. If we take financial success as a measure, then winners and losers (e.g., Google and Yahoo) are unavoidable.

If giving is merely a means to an end, to achieve success at the expense of others, then we may ask what reasons beyond organizational success can Grant appeal to castigate taking and promote giving? If no reasons are forthcoming, is Grant then encouraging taking behavior in politics since he concedes that that happens to be a successful short-term strategy for candidates to receive votes?

Grant does not deal with these issues partly because they are beyond the scope of the book. The knottier conundrums that arise between normative and applied ethics in moral philosophy, though relevant, can be rather abstract and are by no means easy to answer. Furthermore, coherent ethical frameworks are made infinitely more difficult to articulate when dealing with large organizations. 

Regardless, Give and Take delivers on what it sets out to do and is well worth reading. The book will be of special interest to givers who wish to find encouragement and some measure of success at work. At the end, Grant offers several actionable steps for people who wish to develop a giving reciprocity style and promote an organizational culture where givers succeed. The E-book version also conveniently links research cited in the text to their corresponding reference at the end. The appropriate links are given below. 

Links

Here is the link to his Give and Take site where you can buy the book. Here’s the link to his Talks at Google talk, and the link to his TED talk.