Published on: July 8, 2025 at 10:08 pm
Treating employees well creates a reservoir of goodwill that employers can tap into to keep morale high and preserve organizational loyalty during difficult times.
Academy of Management Scholar Jaqueline “Jackie” Coyle-Shapiro of California State University, San Bernardino, and the London School of Economics said that if organizations develop high-quality relationships with their employees, then that will act as a buffer that dampens the effect of negative events that employees might interpret as a “psychological contract breach.”
“The lesson that I would give to leaders and managers is: Invest in your relationships with your staff—develop high-quality relationships with the people that work for you,” Coyle-Shapiro said. “This takes time; you’ve got to invest resources.
“You’ve got to get to know your employees; you’ve got to understand where they’re coming from,” she said. “Having high-quality relationships with your employees is like a blanket on a cold day.
“It acts as a buffer to actually keep out the cold when you cannot deliver what you promised to an employee.”
High-quality relationships are the foundation for supervisors, managers, and leaders to be successful over the long term. That’s true even if the benefits of investing in people aren’t apparent right away.
“The payoff of relationship-building comes down the road,” Coyle-Shapiro said. “And so when leaders don’t put in the time and effort to do so, if you’ve got managers that are very short-term in their thinking, they’re not going to think about investing and building high-quality relationships early on.
“That is a mistake, primarily because things happen, and supervisors and leaders may find themselves in a situation where they cannot fulfill promises to employees and they can’t promote employees or give them a raise,” she said.
“Perhaps they’ve promised them interesting assignments that aren’t coming to fruition, therefore that high-quality relationship will help buffer the negative effects of that.”
This insight also ties into the benefits of corporate social responsibility and having an organizational mission related to making a positive societal impact that employees can believe in.
“If employees work for an organization with a social mission, and they find that the organization is not fulfilling its promises and obligations to that social mission, what we found is that employees will step up and compensate for the organization’s failure to provide high-quality care to patients, as an example,” Coyle-Shapiro said.
“Employees, particularly those with high professional identification, will step up and compensate for the organization’s lackluster efforts to deliver on its mission statement,” she said.
