Telling your team about the good thing you did isn't the risk. Telling it alone is.

You covered the cost of an employee's car repair so they could make it to work. You quietly picked up a colleague's shift so they could be at a parent's surgery. At the next team meeting, or in the group chat, you mention it — not to boast, you tell yourself, just so people know the kind of place this is. Some of your team feels genuinely moved. Somewhere else in the room, someone's jaw tightens.

Both reactions are real, according to a study published September 3, 2026 in the Journal of Applied Psychology, by Grace Ching Chi Ho of the Department of Management, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship at Southern Methodist University and Hudson Sessions of the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University. The paywall kept me from the full paper, so everything here comes from the published abstract, the summary the authors and the American Psychological Association put on record for it.

The researchers build on existing work about "capitalizing" at work — sharing your wins, your skills, your good news with the people around you — and extend it to a case that research hadn't isolated: a supervisor sharing their own role in a good deed. They ran two studies: a field study of 254 supervisor-employee pairs, and a follow-up experiment with 233 employees. Those are two different kinds of evidence, and worth keeping apart: the field study can show what moves with what inside real workplaces, while the experiment is the one that can support a causal claim. The abstract does not describe the measures, so I can't tell you how much of either rests on employees rating their own supervisor — that caution is mine, not the authors'.

What they found doesn't resolve into one clean lesson — it branches. Talking about your own part in a moral good deed was linked, on its own, to something the authors call employee moral elevation — feeling lifted by the supervisor's good example — which in turn increased employees' own citizenship behavior, the extra, unrewarded things people do for each other and the organization. But that was only half the story. For supervisors who did less to share credit for the good deed with others involved, the same self-focused telling instead triggered disgust in employees, and citizenship behavior fell. Sharing the spotlight, not the deed itself, is what the researchers say moves people from one outcome to the other.

"Indeed, calling attention to one's own morality can convey a holier-than-thou image, marred by self-superiority, virtue signaling, and disingenuousness."From the published abstract, Journal of Applied Psychology, read via PubMed

This lands differently for you than for a manager three layers down in a large company. In a company like yours, there usually isn't a corporate comms team softening how the good news travels, and there isn't much distance between you and the person it's about. If you tell the story and leave out who else made the car repair possible, or who covered the shift so the visit to the hospital could happen, everyone in the room knows exactly who got left out — because they were probably standing next to that person an hour ago. The room is too small for the omission to pass unnoticed.

The part the research doesn't say, but that I'll say plainly: the instinct to tell the story at all usually isn't cynical. Leaders bring up what they did for someone because they want the team to know the culture is real, not because they're angling for praise. That's exactly why it's worth a second look — the intention doesn't determine how it lands, the credit does. And the authors' own finding cuts both ways: it isn't that talking about it is the mistake, since in their data it also produced the more generous outcome. It's that talking about it as though you did it alone is the version that curdles.

One thing to do this week: the next time you're about to mention something decent you did for someone on your team, stop before the sentence ends and add a name — whoever helped make it happen, covered for you, or flagged the problem in the first place. Say it in the same breath, not as a footnote afterward.

If this is a pattern you recognize — being the center of your own good stories without quite meaning to be — the Leadership Profile is built to show you where that instinct comes from and what it costs you with the people who report to you.