Rodolphe (Rudy) Durand
HEC-Paris
Organizing prosociality: From economic performance to collective welfare
Addressing contemporary societal challenges fundamentally requires understanding how prosocial behaviors can be organized more efficiently than protective or exploitative behaviors within economic organizations. Our research demonstrates that workgroups experience performance gains not merely through traditional economic incentives, but through the cultivation of shared purpose that activates members' prosocial orientation—their intrinsic care for fairness and collective welfare. This finding challenges the conventional assumption that self-interested behavior constitutes the most efficient organizing principle. Instead, we find that when purpose is explicit and workgroup prosocial orientation is high, performance improvements reach 13.5% beyond baseline conditions. Critically, prosocials function as conditional cooperators who respond to normative objectives and superordinate goals, suggesting that organized prosociality operates through distinct mechanisms—intrinsic motivation, meaningfulness, and collective identification—that protective or purely self-interested behaviors cannot activate.
The central question becomes: when and why do organized prosocial behaviors outperform individualistic approaches? Our evidence indicates that prosocial orientation strengthens the purpose-performance relationship through two mechanisms. First, prosocials serve as carriers and implementers of collective norms, reciprocating cooperative behaviors and reinforcing workgroup performance through their words, deeds, and interactions. Second, higher prosocial orientation disciplines free-riding by increasing the costs of self-serving behavior, thereby reducing the dissipation of collective effort. These findings suggest that prosocial organizing becomes particularly efficient when purpose is made explicit and when critical mass of prosocially-oriented individuals can establish and maintain cooperative norms. The implication extends beyond firm boundaries: societal challenges requiring coordinated action (from climate change mitigation to public health) may benefit more from cultivating prosocial organizing principles than from relying solely on protective regulations or exploitative competition.
However, such organizing principles demand reconceptualizing performance itself. The traditional economic definition captures only a narrow band of organizational value creation. A more encompassing definition must incorporate the meaningfulness members derive from their work, the identification they feel with collective objectives, and the intrinsic motivation that purpose activates. These soft factors translate into measurable performance differences, suggesting they represent genuine sources of competitive advantage rather than mere rhetorical flourishes. More fundamentally, if organized prosociality enables firms to achieve economic performance while simultaneously fostering member welfare and societal contribution, then performance measurement must expand to capture this multi-dimensional value creation. The firms and societies that thrive in addressing complex challenges may be those that can articulate, measure, and reward prosocial organizing as efficiently as they currently track financial returns.
Bio:
At HEC-Paris, Rodolphe (Rudy) Durand is the Joly Family Professor of Purposeful Leadership and the academic director of the Purpose Center. He is the founder of the Society and Organizations Institute (S&O) which he launched in 2009. As a scholar, Rudy’s primary research interests concern the normative and cognitive dimensions of firms' performance, and especially the consequences for firms of defining their purpose and coping with the current major environmental and social challenges. As a member of Boards (in listed and private firms, in non-profit organizations), impact committee, and purpose committee (comité de mission), Rudy works with multiple organizations on developing, implementing, and assessing impact strategies that value a firm’s purpose and its intangible assets.