The Impact Of Social Comparison On Employees’ Prosocial Behaviors

Social comparison is a social phenomenon in which one’s own situation is compared with others in order to obtain information about oneself,while prosocial behavior refers to the behavior that individuals help,cooperate,share and comfort others to promote their well-being.In the organizational life,employees are always faced with the situation of comparison with others,and they are in a collectivist environment.The performance of others has an important influence on employees’ subsequent behavior.What’s the difference between the results and those of the better people and those of the worse people,and what kind of psychological mechanism is there? In view of this,on the basis of previous studies,this study focuses on the influence of social comparison direction on employees’ prosocial behavior and its psychological mechanism,taking helping behavior and cooperative behavior as the measurement indicators of prosocial behavior.Specifically,this study takes employees as the research object.Firstly,a pre-experiment is designed to test the effectiveness of helping situations.Then,two single-factor inter-subject designs are designed to discuss the helping behavior and cooperative behavior respectively.Among them,the first experiment started social comparison on the basis of pre-experiment to explore the influence of social comparison on helping behavior,and introduced self-esteem and perceived social support as intermediary variables;In the second experiment,the dilemma paradigm of public goods was used to explore the influence of social comparison direction on cooperative behavior on the basis of social comparison.Self-esteem and perceived social support were also introduced as intermediary variables,and the results were as follows:(1)Social comparison significantly influenced helping behavior,and the helping behavior of the upper social comparison group was lower than that of the lower social comparison group,that is,the upper social comparison group reduced helping behavior,while the lower social comparison group increased helping behavior.(2)Social comparison plays a significant role in shaping cooperative behavior.The downward social comparison group exhibits higher levels of cooperative behavior than the upward social comparison group,that is,the upward social comparison reduces cooperative behavior,while the downward social comparison increases cooperative behavior.(3)Self-esteem and perceived social support partially mediate between social comparison,helping behavior and cooperative behavior,and there are three indirect paths:social comparison → self-esteem → helping behavior/cooperative behavior;Social comparison→ understanding social support → helping behavior/cooperative behavior;Social comparison→ self-esteem → understanding social support → helping behavior/cooperative behavior,that is to say,social comparison not only directly affects helping behavior and sharing behavior,but also affects helping behavior and cooperative behavior through independent intermediary and chain intermediary of self-esteem and understanding social support.And the position has a significant predictive effect on cooperative behavior.