Assertion Supported AI assessment confidence: 95% certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Grant: Givers are overrepresented at the best and worst performance extremes

Adam Grant · #22 Adam Grant: Givers, Takers, and the Resilient Mind · Sep 21, 2017 · at 19:27

Adam Grant, organizational psychologist at Wharton, discusses his research on workplace reciprocity and how 'givers' perform across various professions.

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“And, you know, I finally, as I took a closer look at the data, I found that, you know, for salespeople, for engineers and even medical professionals the givers were overrepresented on both extremes of the success spectrum. They made up a disproportionate number of the worst performers and of the best performers.”

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The claim, plainly

In professions like sales, engineering, and medicine, givers are overrepresented at both the lowest and highest extremes of the performance spectrum.

a quote alone can be ambiguous, so this restates it with the references and context of the conversation around it resolved. AI-written; the tape below the player is the source.

Assessment

In Chapter 1 of his 2013 book 'Give and Take', organizational psychologist Adam Grant outlines empirical research across all three cited professions (engineering, medicine, and sales) demonstrating that givers are overrepresented at both the bottom and top of performance distributions. Specifically, data from a 2003 California engineering firm study (Flynn) showed givers had both the lowest objective productivity and populated the highest-output tier. A longitudinal study of 627 Belgian medical students (Lievens et al., 2009) found giver-oriented students had the lowest initial performance but rose to overrepresent top academic and clinical tiers in later years. Finally, a 2011 sales study (Grant and Barnes) established that givers earned the lowest revenues on average while also comprising the top revenue-generating tier.

Francis J. Flynn (2003) study on 161 California engineers found givers at both the lowest and highest ends of objective productivity metrics.
Filip Lievens et al. (2009) longitudinal study of 627 medical students documented giver traits correlating with bottom performance in Year 1 and top performance across later clinical years.
Adam Grant and Dane Barnes (2011) study of salespeople showed self-sacrificing givers produced 2.5 times less revenue than peers while successful givers produced 50 percent more revenue than matchers and takers.

Checked against

[1] adamgrant.net [2] supersummary.com [3] anyflip.com [4] thepowermoves.com [5] thepenngazette.com [6] medium.com [7] forbes.com [8] thepenngazette.com

"salespeople in North Carolina" "Give and Take" "50 percent" OR "two and a half" Adam Grant Give and Take givers sales engineering medicine bottom top "Give and Take" "Good Returns" "engineers" "medical students" "salespeople"

assessed as of 2026-09-03

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Mentioned

Adam Grant givers

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