The ethical cost of assigned performance goals
Description
With massive corruption uncovered in numerous recent corporate scandals, investigating the reasons for unethical behavior in organizations has become a critical area of research for organizational scientists. In response to this need, my dissertation is proposed to offer a better understanding of unethical behavior by focusing on how assigned performance goals can interfere with people's ethical decision-making processes. In the first chapter, I hypothesized that individuals who are assigned performance goals are more likely than those who do not have performance goals to engage in illicit or morally unacceptable behaviors at work. Assigning performance goals was predicted to positively influence unethical behavior by (1) decreasing the likelihood that people will recognize the moral nature of a problem, and (2) making rationalizations for acting unethically easily accessible. I further predicted that the method by which goals are set influences goal recipients' willingness to engage in unethical behavior. That is, due to increased attention and fewer available rationalizations, allowing individuals to participate in goal-setting may be less deleterious to ethical behavior than simply assigning performance goals. The second chapter specifies the methodology and results of two studies (a laboratory experiment involving a managerial decision-making simulation and a field study using self-reported survey data) designed to test the hypotheses advanced in the introduction. Across both studies, results supported the predicted relationships between two mechanism of moral disengagement (i.e., moral justification and displacement of responsibility) and unethical behavior. However, when unethical behavior was regressed on both mechanisms simultaneously, only moral justification displayed an independent relationship with unethical behavior. In addition, the hypothesized positive relationship between ethical recognition and unethical behavior was supported in Study 1. In contrast, the effects of assigned goal-setting and goal-setting method on unethical behavior were inconsistent. Initial results from Study 1 suggested that assigned goal-setting and goal-setting method did not influence unethical behavior. Post-hoc analyses did reveal that the predicted effects may only hold when goals are sufficiently difficult. In Study 2, results again revealed that assigned goal-setting was not related to unethical behavior. However, supplementary analyses operationalizing assigned goal-setting differently indicated that people assigned performance goals did report more unethical behavior than those without performance goals. Finally, goal-setting method was significantly related to unethical behavior in the second study, although the proposed mediators (i.e., moral justification, displacement of responsibility, and ethical recognition) did not significantly mediate the relationship between goal-setting method and unethical behavior. The final chapter contains a discussion of results, limitations, and implications for future theory and research