Gift exchange
This week, I read three pieces, namely 'How to Get the Rich to Share the Marbles', 'When a Child Thinks Life Is Unfair, Use Game Theory' and 'The Power of Altruism'. All three pieces were from The New York Times website. They provided an interesting view on the topic of gift exchange and they were mainly focusing on examples of children. When reading those articles, I noticed myself thinking about those topics in relation with my working experience with my team at Douglas.
When I worked at Douglas, we had to sell a diverse set of products and I always did it with a lot of fun. I loved helping people with looking for the right products for them and to show them additional products to make their products even more useful. The love for helping people while I was selling products made my sales amount relatively high. After working at Douglas for two months or so, I found out that a high sales amount can lead to personal gifts from the store itself, for example an expensive (tester) parfum. The week after knowing about this gift, I noticed that I didn't like selling additional products as much as I did before and my sales dropped. The reading of David Brooks was talking about the power of altruism and I noticed that the 'reward of kindness' leaded to a decrease in motivation of selling as much as I did, since the manager/store was thinking I needed a gift to sell as good as I did.
Another example within Douglas that came to my mind by reading the piece of Jonathan Haidt about the sharing of marbles was the sharing of gifts within the team of Douglas. When we sold a certain amount of products for a promotion, we (as a team) would receive a set of products from the company of the promotion. Those gift would be sharing with everyone in the team that helped selling for this promotion. Jonathan Haidt mentioned in his piece that 'the 'share-the-spoils' button would not pressed by the mere existence of inequality' and I think this was the case at Douglas. There was inequality within the team, because some of the team member had more experience and found themselves better than other worked. They demanded the 'important' tasks (such as working at the cashier when it was busy) when they had the opportunity to. This unequal working mindset leaded to a certain working environment. Those people in the team therefore demanded the more valuable gifts after the promotion, because they felt more important and they chose to fulfill their individual needs.
This unfair sharing of the gifts could maybe be avoided by the manager if they introduced a technique of the piece of KJ Dell'Antonia. The technique of the 'random dictator' could have been applied when dividing the gifts and it would be more fair than just picking what you think you earn. The manager could collect each individual preferences and use the 'papers in a hat' to draw a fair gift for everyone. Another technique that could have been used is the 'auction', but this one would be somewhat harder to apply. When someone wants a more valuable gift, they can trade for less cleaning hours or more hours at a certain part of the store, for example more hours at makeup instead of parfum. So the valuable gift will go to the person that wants the gift the most and would offer less satisfying tasks in the store as a trade.
Overall, after reading those three pieces, I saw a new side of the functioning within the Douglas work team and I know understand what the reasons were for certain behaviors, just as decreasing motivation for selling after knowing about the gift option. The behavior understanding was not only the interesting part, the application of the Game Theory for children was unexpected to read and gave me some new insights. Unfortunately, I don't work at Douglas anymore, but I would be highly interested in the practical outcome of the Game Theories 'random dictator' and 'auction' when dividing the gifts.
