Being guilty makes you a loyal employee

People who are guilt-prone tend to attend office daily even if they are unhappy with their jobs

Employees who are prone to feeling guilt about disappointing others tend to show up at the office regardless of their job satisfaction, new research suggests. Employees less prone to feeling that guilt, however, tend to show up at work when they feel happy at their job.

While it might seem like a safe assumption that employees who like their jobs would be more likely to show up for work each day, research on the subject of absenteeism hasn’t borne out that assumption. In fact, metaanalyses of the link between job satisfaction and absenteeism find only a weak negative correlation between the two factors.

“When it comes to doing something or not doing it, whether that something is personally pleasurable affects our behaviour less than we might think,” explains Rebecca Schaumberg, who earned her PhD in organisational behaviour/business administration at Stanford University Graduate School of Business and is now an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Instead, Schaumberg and her colleague Francis J. Flynn, professor of organizational behaviour at Stanford, have documented the surprising power of another motivating factor-the guilt people feel when they don’t fulfil someone else’s expectations.

Schaumberg and Flynn found that for workers who had a low degree of guilt proneness, job satisfaction was negatively related to absenteeism-that is, if they were happy with their work, they tended to show up. In contrast, job satisfaction was unrelated to absenteeism for highly guilt-prone employees.

“People who have guilt proneness show up even if they don’t like their job as much,” Flynn says.A propensity for experiencing guilt might seem like a painful psychological affliction. Previous studies by Schaumberg and Flynn have found that highly guilt-prone individuals have a higher degree of commitment to organizations and are routinely rated in performance reviews as being more capable leaders than counterparts who are less prone to feeling guilty.