Employers Watch Out! Neglected Employees are Likely to Cheat and Lie: Study

Workers who feel neglected at work are more likely to cheat, according to a study.

Regular interactions and social relations are important in our everyday life and various researches say isolation can be bad for mental well-being and leads to depression, phobia and anxiety. Researchers at the University Georgia Terry College of Business found workplace discrimination like excluding a person from a group or interaction sessions can induce them to cheat and look for short-cuts at work. For the study, the experts conducted personality tests on certain number of participants who were divided into groups of four and instructed to interact with each other for at least 15 minutes. The subjects then had to participate in tests and compete against other teams.

Their risk of exclusion was assessed based on their responses on which member of their team they felt was eligible to take part in the last group task. The experimenters gave the participants their team reviews on whether or not the person will proceed further.  Volunteers who were not nominated as a potential candidate to take part in the last group task were quizzed on a difficult anagram that could be barely unscramble and also did not have an accurate answer.  

This group of subjects reportedly lied about having solved these anagrams.

"There was definitive cheating. If they put down even one thing, that was cheating. There's a generally human tendency when faced with these kind of situations for individuals to misreport what they did. But those who had a high-need for social approval and were in the group that were being excluded, they were far more likely to cheat," said Marie Mitchell, co-author and professor at the University Georgia Terry College of Business in a news release.

The authors noted participants either lied to fit in to the group or just to compete with their opponents in the task. But, such behaviors can be harmful for both the employee and the organization in the long run. In real profession setting, groupism, bullying and mistreatment can make people develop low self-esteem and they might assume that they are incompetent to be a part of the organization. Feeling left out and having no one to talk to or share lunch with can drive workers to be unethical, lie, cheat or undermine their colleagues and sub-ordinates just  to prove their worth and seek approval.

"So the risk of social exclusion essentially motivates some pretty unsavory behaviors out of individuals at work. Research from others suggests that these are pretty costly behaviors, and that they're a lot more prevalent than people think that they are. The cost to organizations ranks into the billions of dollars annually. If you're a manager and you see someone who is not integrating well with the rest of the employees, take care in handling them and try to get them better integrated with their colleagues," advises Mitchell, reports the Psych Central.

More information is available online in the journal of Applied Psychology.