The title seems to fly in the face of logic. But University of Florida business professor Klodiana Lanaj recently outlined a major downside to this approach. Helping your colleagues is exhausting. In two recently published studies she and her colleagues discovered that helpfulness at work is something of a tightrope walk: It can boost your energy, but it can also leave you feeling depleted.
Source: Science of US, October 19, 2016.
In other words: You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. On the one hand, conserving your mental energy is a sensible instinct; on the other hand, no one wants to be the office jerk. Perhaps helping, like everything else, is best done in moderation — and deployed strategically.
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