How to Recognize and Prevent ‘Bottom-Line Mentality’ in Fundraising

Sometimes professionals can become so focused on a job-related goal that they neglect other important goals or aspects of their lives. Such hyper-focus on a goal often leads to negative behavior that may be attributable to bottom-line mentality. Oklahoma State University and Drexel University conducted research on this concept, which was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

As a graduate student studying talent management and a former nonprofit professional, I am interested in bottom-line mentality because I have seen fundraisers act in unethical and overly competitive ways that may be explained by this mind-set. Understanding why these negative behaviors occur can help organizations combat them and retain top talent.

While predominately studied in for-profit industries, bottom-line mentality appears in the workplace when, for example, employees become so obsessed with getting a promotion that they neglect their morals and good sportsmanship and try to sabotage colleagues vying for the same role.

This kind of mentality is sometimes seen among fundraisers and senior leaders at nonprofits. For example, development professionals may become so obsessed with meeting big-gift targets or building their reputations and networks that they behave unethically. Providing incentive pay to fundraisers may increase the likelihood that they will develop these behaviors.

Bottom-Line mentality may explain or give insights into the following controversial practices we see in fundraising today:

• Sabotaging colleagues
• Taking unethical money (e.g., MIT accepting gifts from Jeffrey Epstein or Lori Loughlin committing fraud to get her daughter into the University of Southern California)
• Poor work-life balance due to working strange hours or traveling a lot to meet donors and achieve gift quotas
• Taking credit for gifts raised by one’s peers
• Seeking unwarranted shared credit for a gift that a peer or subordinate acquired
• Joining a colleague’s or subordinate’s gifts to get credit even though it is unwarranted
• Stealing or hiding prospective donors from colleagues or subordinates

Research shows that supervisors who have a bottom-line approach often create negative work environments. This may lead subordinates to develop or display unethical behavior, workaholic tendencies, an intention to resign from the workplace, insomnia, or shame — or they may even adopt the same mentality.

Studies have found that employees with a bottom-line mentality may display a peculiar fixation with their work, which may take the form of working unusually long hours, routinely skipping breaks, or a hyper-focusing on a project or goal.

Identifying this mindset in the workplace and taking steps to prevent or correct it can benefit employees and help an entire organization. If you want to learn if bottom-line mentality is a part of your culture, you could survey fundraisers about work habits and culture and include the following statement and corresponding scale, developed by the authors of the 2012 research. This scale has been statistically proven to identify people who possess a bottom-line mentality.

On a scale of 1-5 (strongly disagree — strongly agree), please indicate how much you agree with the following statements:

I am solely concerned with meeting the bottom line.

I only care about my goal.

I treat the bottom line as more important than anything else.

I care more about obtaining my goal than the well-being of others.

Individuals who rate themselves on the higher end of the scale for these four statements are likely to have a BLM. (Please note: Using this measure must be coupled with proper data analysis and statistical techniques or the results may be inaccurate, skewed, or meaningless.)

Here are a few ways, drawn from numerous academic studies, that leaders can prevent bottom-line behavior at nonprofits:

• Manage workloads and stressors for managers and subordinates.
• Take a firm stance against unethical behavior.
• Do not display bottom-line tendencies, such as aggressively touting one specific team goal or having an unhealthy focus on monetary goals.
• Evaluate supervisors regularly to ensure they aren’t mistreating or setting unrealistic expectations for staff members.
• Create a culture that promotes conscientiousness, self-regulation, ethical behavior, and self-efficacy. This can be done by creating a zero-tolerance policy against unethical actions, providing training and development that is focused on developing social and emotional skills, or setting manageable workloads and performance expectations.