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Work-report formats and overbilling: How unit-reporting vs. cost-reporting increases accountability and decreases overbilling
Abstract
The current paper examines how asking for a report of units of work completed versus cost of the same work can influence overbilling. We suggest that something as simple as asking for a report of units of work completed (for instance, reporting either the time spent or number of units of work completed) as opposed to the cost of the work completed can drive different unethical behaviors. We argue that unit-reporting makes providers feel accountable for their actions, and this induced accountability, in turn, impacts actual billing behaviors. We present seven studies, including a field experiment in the auto-repair industry that demonstrate the effect of different work-report formats on overbilling and provide evidence for our proposed underlying mechanism.
... As always, generalization of experimental findings should be cautious, and subject to the accumulation of research that offers replications of the effect as well as identifying boundary conditions. For example, Desai and Kouchaki (2015) recently reported a study that seemed to favor the one-by-one policy over the all-at-once policy. In this study, an experimenter contacted garage mechanics to obtain an estimate for changing the brake pads of a car. ...
... On a theoretical level, one-by-one and all-at-once reporting procedures can be used to test possible interactions between accountability (e.g., Tetlock, 1992;Lerner and Tetlock, 1999;Desai and Kouchaki, 2015) and lie aversion (e.g., Gneezy, 2005;Lundquist et al., 2009;Shalvi et al., 2011b;Hilbig and Hessler, 2013). The two constructs could probably be combined to work in the same direction and encourage honesty. ...
Organizational monitoring relies frequently on self-reports (e.g., work hours, progress reports, travel expenses). A “one-by-one” policy requires employees to submit a series of reports (e.g., daily or itemized reports). An “all-at-once” policy requires an overall report (e.g., an annual or an overview report). Both policies use people's self-reports to determine their pay, and both allow people to inflate their reports to get higher incentives, that is, to cheat. Objectively, people can cheat to the same extent under both reporting policies. However, the two policies differ in that the segmented one-by-one policy signals closer monitoring than the all-at-once policy. We suggest here that lie aversion may have a paradoxical effect on closer monitoring and lead people to cheat more. Specifically, reporting a series of segmented units of performance (allowing small lies) should lead to more cheating than a one-shot report of overall performance (that require one larger lie). Two surveys indicated that while people perceive the all-at-once policy as more trusting, they still expected people would be equally likely to cheat in both policies. An experiment tested the effects of the two reporting policies on cheating. The findings showed that contrary to the participants' intuition, but in line with research on lie aversion, the one-by-one policy resulted in more cheating than the all-at-once policy. Implications for future research and organization policy are discussed.
... Accountability is a governance mechanism (Garcia et al., 2019) embedded within the organization's social structure (Tetlock, 1985) that, we suggest, fits the category of being a potentially strong situational influence. Accountability is a perceptual state that can be explicitly identified or implicitly felt (Desai and Kouchaki, 2015), and occurs when individuals believe they may be called to answer for, or otherwise justify, their performance (Mero et al., 2007(Mero et al., , 2014. The effectiveness of accountability stems from the principle that answerability for a decision, action or outcome links the individual to the social system to which they belong (Tetlock, 1985). ...
Purpose
With increasing competition in the marketplace, there is a greater push for exceeding customer expectations and delivering customer delight to ensure firm’s success. The main reason for this push is the beneficial outcomes for the firm. More recently, hidden benefits have been identified (i.e. elevated customer emotions can positively impact other customers and employees in the service environment). Adding to this developing literature, the current research develops a model that links antecedents and outcomes to employee perceptions of customer delight.
Design/methodology/approach
Both field and panel data, as well as multiple statistical methods, were utilized to test the hypothesized relationships. The field data were collected from employees of a national specialty retailer.
Findings
Service climate and interpersonal influence have a positive impact on customer delight and employee perceptions of customer delight. In turn, employee perceptions of customer delight positively impact harmonious passion and job dedication. In addition, accountability for pleasing customers is a significant moderator of the relationship between employee perceptions of customer delight and harmonious passion, but not between employee perceptions of customer delight and job dedication.
Research limitations/implications
This research contributes to the ongoing debate on the viability of customer delight as a service standard by investigating the under-studied perspective of the frontline employee.
Practical implications
This research contributes to the debate on the value of customer delight as a service standard by investigating the under-studied perspective of the frontline employee. A key takeaway for practitioners is how to create and manage the delight spirals that can occur when customers are delighted.
Originality/value
This is the first study that evaluates antecedents and outcomes of employee-perceived customer delight in a single model. This is also the first study to measure the impact of employee perceptions of customer delight with field data.
... Another way an AFE can vary the input into a process, is to change how an input is framed. For example, Desai and Kouchaki (2015) hypothesized that framing a price request in terms of "units" (versus just an overall cost estimate) increases accountability to report more honestly, ultimately leading to lower (and more accurate) quoted prices. To test this hypothesis, research assistants (who were blind to the hypotheses) called up car garages to ask for an estimate for a repair on their car: when the request was framed by asking first about the costs for labor and parts and second about a good-faith estimate, the quoted price was significantly lower compared to a control condition, in which the request order was reversed -first asking a goodfaith estimate, then for parts and labor. ...
Organizational scholarship centers on understanding organizational context, usually captured through field studies, as well as determining causality, typically with laboratory experiments. We argue that field experiments can bridge these approaches, bringing causality to field research and developing organizational theory in novel ways. We present a taxonomy that proposes when to use an audit field experiment (AFE), procedural field experiment (PFE) or innovation field experiment (IFE) in organizational research and argue that field experiments are more feasible than ever before. With advances in technology, behavioral data has become more available and randomized changes are easier to implement, allowing field experiments to more easily create value—and impact—for scholars and organizations alike.
... In light of meta-analytic findings that the presence of a code of conduct (something intended to directly influence ethical behavior in a positive way) has no effect on employees' ethical behavior (Kish-Gephart et al. 2010), the fact that a subtle change in the way someone's tasks are ordered (something completely unrelated to ethical behavior) has any effect on rule breaking behavior is important. The magnitude of this effect is consistent with other experimental research that focuses on interventions that can shift morally relevant organizational behaviors, such as conflicts of interest (Sah and Loewenstein 2014) and overbilling (Desai and Kouchaki 2015). ...
In this paper we argue that task design affects rule breaking in the workplace. Specifically, we propose that task variety activates deliberative (Type 2) processes as opposed to automatic/intuitive (Type 1) processes, which, in turn, helps prevent individuals from breaking rules in order to serve their own hedonic self-interest. We use data from the home loan application processing operations of a Japanese bank to establish the phenomenon in the field. We document that increased task variety at a daily level is associated with lower levels of rule breaking in the form of violating corporate break time policies (Study 1). We further explore the relationship between task variety and rule breaking in three lab experiments, using different operationalizations of rule breaking (Studies 2, 3a, and 3b) and provide direct evidence for the mediating effect of deliberative thinking in this relationship (Studies 3a and 3b). We discuss implications for rule compliance in organizations, behavioral ethics, and work design.
... Therefore, felt accountability for impression management motives, identified as the motives of good actors, is an appropriate concept for self-serving motives. The self-serving motive is the implicit or explicit expectation that one's decisions or actions will be subject to evaluation by some salient audience(s), and it is the belief in the potential for either rewards or sanctions based on this expected evaluation (Desai & Kouchaki, 2015;Hall, Frink, Ferris, Hochwarter, Kacmar & Bowen, 2003). According to definition, individuals are likely to speak out because they expect to gain rewards or sanctions after making a good impression, and individuals use these perceived role expectations to shape their attitudes and guide their behavior. ...
This paper aims to develop a model delineating the relationship between altruistic concern for prosocial motives/felt accountability for impression management motives of voice behavior and employees' career success. The model proposed in this study argues that the relationship between motives and career success depends on the voice behavior mediating mechanism and the moderating effect of supervisor-attributed motives on the relationship between voice behavior and career success. The results stress the importance of the context of supervisor attribution motives in linked voice behavior and career success. Overall, our model attempts to address these concerns by highlighting in particular the role of the perspective of supervisor attribution motives to advance the body of knowledge about voice behavior and career success. Practical and theoretical implications are addressed on the basis of the research findings as well as suggestions for future research in the employee voice behavior field.
... It is possible that when superiors form moral attributions regarding a subordinate due to exposure to moral symbols, they likely imagine how such an ethical employee would judge them if he or she were to find out how unethical the request was. Previous work has demonstrated that accountability modifies thought processes such that people become more critical of their future actions (Desai & Kouchaki, 2015;Lerner & Tetlock, 1999). Thus, feelings of accountability may make unethical superiors avoid issuing the directive to an employee perceived as high moral character. ...
This paper investigates whether, by exposing superiors to moral symbols, subordinates can discourage their superiors from asking them to perform unethical acts. Findings from five laboratory studies and one organizational survey study demonstrated that exposure to moral symbols displayed by the subordinates dissuades superiors from both engaging in unethical behaviors themselves and asking their subordinates to engage in unethical behavior. This paper shows that the display of moral symbols leads to two main consequences: (1) the activation of the concept of morality and increases in individuals' moral awareness to decrease unethical behavior, and (2) eliciting inferences about the moral character of the displayer to lower the likelihood of that person being subjected to unethical directives. Additionally, our findings demonstrate that moral symbols influence ethical decisions without provoking hidden backlash effects against those who display them. In sum, our findings show that followers can serve as a form of social influence to guide their leader's behavior and reduce the occurrence of unethical acts in the workplace.
The current study investigated the relationship of the Dark Triad with peer reporting, which occurs when an employee informs management that another coworker has engaged in counterproductive work behavior (CWB). We hypothesized that low organizational commitment would strengthen the negative relationships between each Dark Triad trait and peer reporting. Data from 281 employees suggested that low organizational commitment indeed strengthened the negative relationships between (a) narcissism and the base rate of peer reporting CWBs and (b) psychopathy and the base rate of peer reporting CWBs. Our findings thus extended Dark Triad research to the topic of peer reporting.
Using an experiment, we demonstrate that a communication regime where a worker communicates about his intended effort is less effective in i) soliciting truthful information, and ii) motivating effort, than a regime where he communicates about his past effort. Our experiment uses a real-effort task, which additionally allows us to demonstrate the effects of communication on effort over time. We show that the timing of communication affects the dynamic pattern of work. In both treatments, individuals are most cooperative closest to the time of communication. Our results reveal that the timing of communication is a critical feature that merits attention in the design of mechanisms for information transmission in strategic settings.
This research examines how being faced with a potential negative versus positive status change influences peoples’ willingness to ethically transgress to avoid or achieve these respective outcomes. Across four studies people were consistently more likely to cheat to prevent a negative status change than to realize a positive change. We argue that what accounts for these results is the enhanced value placed on retaining one’s status in the face of a potential negative change. Taken together, these findings offer a dynamic perspective to the study of status and ethics and contribute to knowledge of the situational factors that promote unethical behavior.
This paper examines how firm investments in technology-based employee monitoring impact both misconduct and productivity. We use unique and detailed theft and sales data from 392 restaurant locations from five firms that adopt a theft monitoring information technology (IT) product. We use difference-in-differences (DD) models with staggered adoption dates to estimate the treatment effect of IT monitoring on theft and productivity. We find significant treatment effects in reduced theft and improved productivity that appear to be primarily driven by changed worker behavior rather than worker turnover. We examine four mechanisms that may drive this productivity result: economic and cognitive multitasking, fairness-based motivation, and perceived increases of general oversight. The observed productivity results represent substantial financial benefits to both firms and the legitimate tip-based earnings of workers. Our results suggest that employee misconduct is not solely a function of individual differences in ethics or morality, but can also be influenced by managerial policies that can benefit both firms and employees.
People often experience anxiety in the workplace. Across 6 studies, we show that anxiety, both induced and measured, can lead to self-interested unethical behavior. In Studies 1 and 2, we find that compared with individuals in a neutral state, anxious individuals are more willing (a) to participate in unethical actions in hypothetical scenarios and (b) to engage in more cheating to make money in situations that require truthful self-reports. In Studies 3 and 4, we explore the psychological mechanism underlying unethical behaviors when experiencing anxiety. We suggest and find that anxiety increases threat perception, which, in turn, results in self-interested unethical behaviors. Study 5 shows that, relative to participants in the neutral condition, anxious individuals find their own unethical actions to be less problematic than similar actions of others. In Study 6, data from subordinate-supervisor dyads demonstrate that experienced anxiety at work is positively related with experienced threat and unethical behavior. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).
Can mere exposure to money corrupt? In four studies, we examined the likelihood of unethical outcomes when the construct of money was activated through the use of priming techniques. The results of Study 1 demonstrated that individuals primed with money were more likely to demonstrate unethical intentions than those in the control group. In Study 2, we showed that participants primed with money were more likely to adopt a business decision frame. In Studies 3 and 4, we found that money cues triggered a business decision frame, which led to a greater likelihood of unethical intentions and behavior. Together, the results of these studies demonstrate that mere exposure to money can trigger unethical intentions and behavior and that decision frame mediates this effect.
Many written forms required by businesses and governments rely on honest reporting. Proof of honest intent is typically provided through signature at the end of, e.g., tax returns or insurance policy forms. Still, people sometimes cheat to advance their financial self-interests-at great costs to society. We test an easy-to-implement method to discourage dishonesty: signing at the beginning rather than at the end of a self-report, thereby reversing the order of the current practice. Using laboratory and field experiments, we find that signing beforerather than afterthe opportunity to cheat makes ethics salient when they are needed most and significantly reduces dishonesty.
We examine how organizational practices making an economic evaluation of time salient, such as hourly pay, can lead people to spend less time on uncompensated work-volunteering. Using nationally representative survey data, in Study 1 we showed that, with other factors that might affect time decisions controlled, people paid by the hour were both less likely to volunteer and spent less time volunteering than counterparts who were not paid hourly. Study 2 showed that having people calculate their hourly wage was associated with decreased willingness to volunteer and that this experimental manipulation only affected people not paid by the hour.
Dishonesty plays a large role in the economy. Causes for (dis)honest behavior seem to be based partially on external rewards, and partially on internal rewards. Here, we investigate how such external and internal rewards work in concert to produce (dis)honesty. We propose and test a theory of self-concept maintenance that allows people to engage to some level in dishonest behavior, thereby benefiting from external benefits of dishonesty, while maintaining their positive view about themselves in terms of being honest individuals. The results show that (1) given the opportunity to engage in beneficial dishonesty, people will engage in such behaviors; (2) the amount of dishonesty is largely insensitive to either the expected external benefits or the costs associated with the deceptive acts; (3) people know about their actions but do not update their self-concepts; (4) causing people to become more aware of their internal standards for honesty decreases their tendency for deception; and (5) increasing the "degrees of freedom" that people have to interpret their actions increases their tendency for deception. We suggest that dishonesty governed by self-concept maintenance is likely to be prevalent in the economy, and understanding it has important implications for designing effective methods to curb dishonesty.Former working paper titles:“(Dis)Honesty: A Combination of Internal and External Rewards” and "Almost Honest: Internal and External Motives for Honesty")
Three laboratory studies investigated the hypothesis that the presence of wealth may influence people’s propensity to engage in unethical behavior for financial gain. In the experiments, participants were given the opportunity to cheat by overstating their performance on an anagram task. In each study, one group was stimulated by the visible proximity of monetary wealth. We found that the presence of abundant wealth led to more frequent cheating than an environment of scarcity. Our experiments also investigated the potential mechanisms behind this effect. The results showed that the presence of abundant wealth provoked feelings of envy toward wealthy others that, in turn, led to unethical behavior. Our findings offer insights into when and why people engage in unethical behavior.
We empirically examine the reflexive or automatic aspects of moral decision making. To begin, we develop and validate a measure of an individual's implicit assumption regarding the inherent morality of business. Then, using an in-basket exercise, we demonstrate that an implicit assumption that business is inherently moral impacts day-to-day business decisions and interacts with contextual cues to shape moral behavior. Ultimately, we offer evidence supporting a characterization of employees as reflexive interactionists: moral agents whose automatic decision-making processes interact with the environment to shape their moral behavior.
These studies examined how the practice of accounting for one's time-so that work can be billed or charged to specific clients or projects-affects the decision to allocate time to volunteer activities. Using longitudinal data collected from law students transitioning to their first jobs, Study 1 showed that exposure to billing time diminished individuals' willingness to volunteer, even after controlling for attitudes about volunteering held before entering the workforce as well as the individual's specific opportunity costs of volunteering time. Studies 2-5 experimentally manipulated billing time and confirmed its causal effect on individuals' willingness to volunteer and actual volunteering behavior. Study 5 showed that the effect of exposure to billing time on volunteering occurred above and beyond any effects on general self-efficacy or self-determination. Individual differences moderated the effects of billing, such that people who did not value money as much were less affected.
The motivation, planning, production, comprehension, coordination, and evaluation of human social life may be based largely on combinations of 4 psychological models. In communal sharing, people treat all members of a category as equivalent. In authority ranking, people attend to their positions in a linear ordering. In equality matching, people keep track of the imbalances among them. In market pricing, people orient to ratio values. Cultures use different rules to implement the 4 models. In addition to an array of inductive evidence from many cultures and approaches, the theory has been supported by ethnographic field work and 19 experimental studies using 7 different methods testing 6 different cognitive predictions on a wide range of subjects from 5 cultures.
This experiment tested predictions derived from a social contingency model of judgment and choice that identifies 3 distinctive strategies that people rely on in dealing with demands for accountability from important interpersonal or institutional audiences. The model predicts that (a) when people know the views of the audience and are unconstrained by past commitments, they will rely on the low-effort acceptability heuristic and simply shift their views toward those of the prospective audience, (b) when people do not know the views of the audience and are unconstrained by past commitments, they will be motivated to think in relatively flexible, multidimensional ways (preemptive self-criticism), and (c) when people are accountable for positions to which they feel committed, they will devote the majority of their mental effort to justifying those positions (defensive bolstering). The experiment yielded results supportive of these 3 predictions. The study also revealed some evidence of individual differences in social and cognitive strategies for coping with accountability.
This article reviews the now extensive research literature addressing the impact of accountability on a wide range of social judgments and choices. It focuses on 4 issues: (a) What impact do various accountability ground rules have on thoughts, feelings, and action? (b) Under what conditions will accountability attenuate, have no effect on, or amplify cognitive biases? (c) Does accountability alter how people think or merely what people say they think? and (d) What goals do accountable decision makers seek to achieve? In addition, this review explores the broader implications of accountability research. It highlights the utility of treating thought as a process of internalized dialogue; the importance of documenting social and institutional boundary conditions on putative cognitive biases; and the potential to craft empirical answers to such applied problems as how to structure accountability relationships in organizations.
Money has been said to change people's motivation (mainly for the better) and their behavior toward others (mainly for the worse). The results of nine experiments suggest that money brings about a self-sufficient orientation in which people prefer to be free of dependency and dependents. Reminders of money, relative to nonmoney reminders, led to reduced requests for help and reduced helpfulness toward others. Relative to participants primed with neutral concepts, participants primed with money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance.
Economic models of incentives in employment relationships are based on a specific theory of motivation. Employees are 'rational cheaters,' who anticipate the consequences of their actions and shirk when the perceived marginal benefit exceeds the marginal cost. Managers respond to this decision calculus by implementing monitoring and incentive pay practices that lessen the attraction of shirking. This 'rational cheater model' is not the only model of opportunistic behavior, and indeed is viewed skeptically by human resource practitioners and by many non-economists who study employment relationships. We investigate the 'rational cheater model' using data from a double-blind field experiment that allows us to observe the effect of experimentally-induced variations in monitoring on employee opportunism. The experiment is unique in that it occurs in the context of an ongoing employment relationship, i.e., with the firm's employees producing output as usual under the supervision of their front-line managers. The results indicate that a significant fraction of employees behave roughly in ccordance with the 'rational cheater model.' We also find, however, that a substantial proportion of employees do not respond to manipulations in the monitoring rate. This heterogeneity is related to employee assessments about their general treatment by the emp loyer.
Money, a resource that absorbs much daily attention, seems to be involved in much unethical behavior, which suggests that money itself may corrupt. This research examined a way to offset such potentially deleterious effects-by focusing on time, a resource that tends to receive less attention than money but is equally ubiquitous in daily life. Across four experiments, we examined whether shifting focus onto time can salvage individuals' ethicality. We found that implicitly activating the construct of time, rather than money, leads individuals to behave more ethically by cheating less. We further found that priming time reduces cheating by making people reflect on who they are. Implications for the use of time primes in discouraging dishonesty are discussed.
Our study explores loan officers’ perceptions of auditors’ independence and audit quality under three experimental audit firm rotation scenarios. We use a case experiment with a between-subjects design to determine whether rotation of the audit firm impacts financial statement users’ perceptions of auditor’s independence and quality. Findings based on 212 useable responses indicate that loan officers do perceive an increase in independence when the company follows an audit firm rotation policy. However, the length of auditor tenure within rotation fails to significantly change loan officers’ perceptions of independence. Findings also indicate that neither the presence of a rotation policy nor the length of the auditor tenure within rotation significantly influences the loan officers’ perceptions of audit quality.
Previous attitude-attribution studies indicate that people are often quick to draw conclusions about the attitudes and personalities of others-even when plausible external or situational causes for behavior exist (an affect known as the overattribution effect or fundamental attribution error). This experiment explores whether accountability-pressures to justify one's causal interpretations of behavior to others-reduces or eliminates this bias. Subjects were exposed to an essay that supported or opposed affirmative action. They were informed that the essay writer had freely chosen or had been assigned the position he took. Finally, subjects either did not expect to justify their impressions of the essay writer or expected to justify their impressions either before or after exposure to the stimulus information. The results replicated previous findings when subjects did not feel accountable for their impressions of the essay writer or learned of being accountable only after viewing the stimulus information. Subjects attributed essay-consistent attitudes to the writer even when the writer had been assigned the task of advocating a particular position. Subjects were, however, significantly more sensitive to situational determinants of the essay writer's behavior when they felt accountable for their impressions prior to viewing the stimulus information. The results suggest that accountability eliminated the overattribution effect by affecting how subjects initially encoded and analyzed stimulus information.
This chapter advances to a testable middle-range theory predicated on the politician metaphor: the social contingency model of judgment and choice. This model does not map neatly in any of the traditional levels of analysis: the individual, the small group, the organization, and political system. The unit of study is the individual in relation to these social milieux. The model borrows, qualifies, and elaborates on the cognitive miser image of the thinker that has been so influential in experimental work on social cognition. The model adopts the approval and status-seeker image of human nature that has been so influential in role theory, symbolic interactionism, and impression management theory. The model draws on sociological and anthropological theory concerning the necessary conditions for social order in positing accountability to be a universal feature of natural decision environments. The social contingency model is not tightly linked to any particular methodology. The theoretical eclecticism of the model demands a corresponding commitment to methodological eclecticism. The social contingency model poses problems that cross disciplinary boundaries, and that require a plurality of methodologies. The chapter ends with considering the potential problem of proliferating metaphors in social psychological theory.
Three studies are used to examine how surveillance and sanctioning systems affect cooperative behavior in dilemma situations. The first two studies demonstrate that a weak sanctioning system results in less cooperation than no sanctioning system; furthermore, results from the second study suggest that sanctions affect the type of decision people perceive they are making, prompting them to see it as a business rather than an ethical decision. The results from these studies are used to develop a theoretical model that postulates that the relationship between sanctions and cooperation is due to both a signaling effect, in which sanctions influence the type of decision that is perceived to be made, and a processing effect, in which the decision processing, including whether or not the strength of the sanction is considered, depends on the decision frame evoked. A third study provides support for the processing-effect hypothesis.
This paper provides an answer to the question of why agents make self-serving decisions under moral hazard and how their self-serving decisions can be kept in check through institutional arrangements. Our theoretical model predicts that the agents’ power and the manner in which they are held accountable jointly determine their propensity to make self-serving decisions. We test our theory in the context of financial investment decisions made under moral hazard using others’ funds. Across three studies, using different decision-making tasks, different manipulations of power and accountability, and different samples, we show that agents’ power makes them more likely to behave in a self-serving manner under moral hazard, but only when the appropriate accountability mechanisms are not in place. Specifically, we distinguish between outcome and procedural accountability and show that holding agents accountable for their decision-making procedure reduces the level of self-serving decisions under moral hazard and also curbs the negative consequences of power. Implications for decisions under moral hazard, the psychology of power, and the accountability literature are discussed.
Explored the impact of accountability (the need to justify one's views to others) on the complexity of people's thinking on controversial social issues. 48 undergraduates reported their thoughts on 3 issues and then responded to a series of attitude scales relevant to each topic. Ss provided this information under 1 of 4 conditions: expecting their attitudes to be anonymous or expecting to justify their attitudes to an individual with liberal, conservative, or unknown views. Consistent with previous work on strategic attitude shifts, Ss reported more liberal attitudes when they expected to justify their views to a conservative. Accountability also increased the integrative complexity and evaluative inconsistency of the thoughts reported on each issue but only when Ss expected to justify their attitudes to an individual with unknown views. Findings suggest that accountability leads to more complex information processing only when people do not have the cognitively lazy option of simply expressing views similar to those of the individual to whom they feel accountable. (39 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Conducted 2 experiments on the effects of opportunity to communicate and visibility of individual decisions on socially responsible behavior in group situations involving the "commons" problem. 280 undergraduates in a business administration course were assigned roles as firm representatives and assembled in groups of 5 to bid on contracts under various conditions. Opportunity to communicate resulted in more socially responsible bidding, but visibility of individual decisions had no effect. Opportunity to communicate also helped to sustain socially responsible bidding in the face of a persistently defecting group member. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
with the objective of integration, this chapter will discuss aspects of a theory of self-identification / we consider the nature and implications of self-identification as a goal-directed activity in its own right and as a component of other goal-directed social behaviors
the nature of self-identification / desirable images / "active" and "passive" self-identification context / person, situation, and audience identity images (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
We present evidence that reassigning tasks among agents can alleviate moral hazard in communication. A rotation policy that routinely reassigns loan officers to borrowers of a commercial bank affects the officers' reporting behavior. When an officer anticipates rotation, reports are more accurate and contain more bad news about the borrower's repayment prospects. As a result, the rotation policy makes bank lending decisions more sensitive to officer reports. The threat of rotation improves communication because self-reporting bad news has a smaller negative effect on an officer's career prospects than bad news exposed by a successor.
In 1995 a group of 1724 randomly selected Minnesota taxpayers was informed by letter that the returns they were about to file would be ‘closely examined’. Compared to a control group that did not receive this letter, low and middle-income taxpayers in the treatment group on average increased tax payments compared to the previous year, which we interpret as indicating the presence of noncompliance. The effect was much stronger for those with more opportunity to evade; in fact, the difference in differences is not statistically significant for those who do not have self-employment or farm income, and do not pay estimated tax. Surprisingly, however, the reported tax liability of the high income treatment group fell sharply relative to the control group.
The present research examines whether or not endowment asymmetry leads those with many endowments to contribute more than those with few endowments towards the public good (i.e., a first-order dilemma), but also towards the implementation of a sanctioning system (i.e., a second-order dilemma). In Experiment 1, we found that those with many endowments contributed more than those with few endowments in a public good dilemma without a sanctioning system present, whereas those with many endowments did not contribute more than those with few endowments toward the implementation of a sanctioning system. The latter effect, however, was eliminated when participants were accountable (i.e., when expectations that they would have to justify their decisions to others in the group were high). Experiment 2 showed that when participants were accountable, the contributions of those with many endowments (and not those with few endowments) toward the sanctioning system increased, but only when they perceived the group to be more self-evaluative in terms of morality (i.e., high-evaluation expectancy). Experiment 3 showed that this effect of evaluation expectancy only emerged when participants were accountable to the whole group rather than to only one group member.
Proposes a social psychological construct of self-monitoring (self-observation and self-control guided by situational cues to social appropriateness) of expressive behavior and self-presentation. An internally consistent, temporally stable self-report measure of individual differences in self-monitoring was constructed. 4 converging laboratory and field studies of peer perception ratings, criterion group membership, self-control of facial and vocal emotional expressive behavior, and attention to normative social comparison information were conducted with undergraduates to demonstrate the convergent and discriminant validity of the Self-Monitoring Scale (SM). The use of SM to investigate hypotheses concerning consistency in expression across situations and between channels of expressive behavior is discussed. (28 ref)
Hypotheses involving mediation are common in the behavioral sciences. Mediation exists when a predictor affects a dependent variable indirectly through at least one intervening variable, or mediator. Methods to assess mediation involving multiple simultaneous mediators have received little attention in the methodological literature despite a clear need. We provide an overview of simple and multiple mediation and explore three approaches that can be used to investigate indirect processes, as well as methods for contrasting two or more mediators within a single model. We present an illustrative example, assessing and contrasting potential mediators of the relationship between the helpfulness of socialization agents and job satisfaction. We also provide SAS and SPSS macros, as well as Mplus and LISREL syntax, to facilitate the use of these methods in applications.
Researchers often conduct mediation analysis in order to indirectly assess the effect of a proposed cause on some outcome through a proposed mediator. The utility of mediation analysis stems from its ability to go beyond the merely descriptive to a more functional understanding of the relationships among variables. A necessary component of mediation is a statistically and practically significant indirect effect. Although mediation hypotheses are frequently explored in psychological research, formal significance tests of indirect effects are rarely conducted. After a brief overview of mediation, we argue the importance of directly testing the significance of indirect effects and provide SPSS and SAS macros that facilitate estimation of the indirect effect with a normal theory approach and a bootstrap approach to obtaining confidence intervals, as well as the traditional approach advocated by Baron and Kenny (1986). We hope that this discussion and the macros will enhance the frequency of formal mediation tests in the psychology literature. Electronic copies of these macros may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society's Web archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive/.
Individuals are said to be accountable whenever their performance is monitored and there are consequences (either tangible or intangible) associated with that evaluation. We propose that there are at least two distinct types of accountability. One focuses on justification of the procedure used to arrive at an action (procedural accountability, or PA); the other focuses on the quality of the outcomes of that action (outcome accountability, or OA). In three experiments, subjects judged the likelihood that each of a set of individuals held a particular attitude on the basis of background information about those individuals. Results from Experiments 1 and 2 suggested that PA encourages people to take more of the available information into account. Whether or not this effect was beneficial, however, depended on how relevant that information was to the target judgment. OA had only detrimental effects, increasing the amount of noise (or “scatter”) in subjects' judgments and thus leading to lower accuracy overall. Experiment 3 extended the work on PA, focusing on its relationship to the effects of outcome feedback. Results indicated that PA significantly reduced the tendency to be overly responsive to such feedback by reducing the variability in judgment unrelated to the target event. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.
This study examined the effects of felt accountability, political skill, and job tension on job performance ratings. Specifically, we hypothesized that felt accountability would lead to higher (lower) job performance ratings when coupled with high (low) levels of political skill, and that these relationships would be mediated by job tension. Data were gathered at multiple times over a one-year period (i.e., baseline performance, attitudinal variables one month later, supervisor reports of subordinate performance six months and one year after baseline performance was measured). Strong support was shown for the total effects model, whereby political skill moderated felt accountability—job performance ratings, felt accountability—job tension, and job tension—job performance ratings relationships. However, more focused analyses demonstrated that political skill most strongly moderated the job tension—job performance ratings linkage. Implications, strengths and limitations, and directions for future research are provided.