The coffee will specifically help sleep-deprived workers resist unethical suggestions from those higher up in a company.
“When you’re sleep deprived at work, it’s much easier to simply go along with unethical suggestions from your boss because resistance takes effort and you’re already worn down,” said David Welsh, an organizational behavior professor at the University of Washington. “However, we found that caffeine can give sleep-deprived individuals the extra energy needed to resist unethical behavior.”
The idea is based on previous research by Welsh and Michael Christian, which showed that lack of sleep destroys one’s ability to regulate thoughts, emotions and behaviours, which basically means that sleep-deprived people are more likely to commit unethical acts.
The study adds that these findings are especially important to managers.
“We tend to think of people who work nonstop as the best employees. But they are often the ones making the worst ethical choices,” Christian said. “It’s the people working the longest hours, and getting the least sleep, that managers need to keep their eye on.”
The study was published in the March 2014 issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology.
Volunteers were divided into two groups and kept awake all night, the Consumerist reports. In the morning, one group was given wintergreen gum as a placebo, while the other group chewed gum laced with 200 milligrams of caffeine, or the same amount found in two cups of coffee.
The volunteers were put into a situation where they could go along with a lie to earn extra money. Those who chewed the caffeine gum were more likely to resist the temptation,
The researchers provided the following suggestions to ensure more ethical behaviour in the workplace:
-Provide caffeine in the workplace
-Reduce long hours with scheduling, overtime restrictions and frequent breaks
-Avoid scheduling tasks that require a great deal of self-control when looming deadlines make long hours unavoidable
-Provide workplace napping and sleep awareness training
Workplaces should probably have no problem with the first suggestion — Fortune explains that a recent report from the National Coffee Association shows we’re consuming 18 percent more caffeine than we were in 2013.
