Organizational psychologist Adam Grant the subject of an admiring profile by Susan Dominus in the March 27 New York Times Magazine is the youngest tenured and highest-rated professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. The 31-year-old prof. seems too good to be true: He almost never shoos a student out of his office answers 200 e-mails — most requests for help — a day and almost never turns down a request that will take five minutes or less. Yet he insists that his astounding generosity is also the source of his phenomenal productivity and has the studies to prove it.
The central insight animating Grant’s work is that “the greatest untapped source of motivation is a sense of service to others.” He came to this insight as a Harvard freshman selling advertising for student-produced “Let’s Go” travel guides. He was a miserable salesman until one day a fellow student working in the office mentioned how important the job was to paying for her education. A flash went off in Grant’s head that advertising revenue to keep the business going made a big difference to his coworkers. He immediately became a tiger of a salesman and sold the largest advertising package in the company’s history.
Since that eureka moment Grant has confirmed his own personal insight in numerous fascinating experiments. As a graduate student at theUniversityofMichigan he ran an experiment at a university call center. One of the primary purposes of the call center was to raise money for student scholarships. Grant arranged for the call center workers to hear a fellow student speak about how his scholarship had changed his life. Within a month the amount of time call center workers spent on the phone increased 142 percent and their revenue 171 percent. In another version of the experiment revenues went up 400 percent.
Another Grant experiment involved two different signs by a hospital soap dispenser: One sign urged doctors and nurses to wash frequently to prevent becoming sick; the other urged washing to prevent patients from being infected. Doctors and nurses used 45 percent more soap at dispensers adjacent to the second sign.
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