Helping yourself by helping others: examining personality perceptions

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate experimentally the effect of altruistic behavior on personality perceptions, advancement potential, and reward recommendations and assess whether personality perceptions serve as a mediating mechanism between altruistic behavior and job ratings (e.g. advancement potential). Design/methodology/approach – A randomized experimental design was used to investigate the mediating effect of personality perceptions on the relationship between altruistic behavior and advancement potential and reward recommendations. Findings – It was found that altruistic employees were perceived as having more favorable personality characteristics and received higher advancement potential ratings and greater reward recommendations than their less altruistic counterparts. In addition, personality perceptions were found to mediate partially the relation between altruistic behavior and job ratings (i.e. advancement potential and reward recommendations). Originality/value – Research findings on citizenship behavior and personality are often based on the results of non‐experimental designs. This paper utilized a randomized experiment to investigate a mediating effect using a contemporary approach for testing hypothesized mediation.