The Dark Side of Competition for Status

Unethical behavior within organizations is not rare. We investigate experimentally the role of status-seeking behavior in sabotage and cheating activities aiming at improving one's performance ranking in a flat-wage environment. We find that average effort is higher when individuals are informe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inManagement science Vol. 60; no. 1; pp. 38 - 55
Main Authors Charness, Gary, Masclet, David, Villeval, Marie Claire
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Linthicum INFORMS 01.01.2014
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
Subjects
Analysis
Behavior
Business ethics
Cheating
Compensation
Competition
competitive preferences
doping
Economic analysis
Economic theory
Economics
Economics and Finance
Employee motivation
Employee performance
Employees
Ethical behavior
Ethics
experiment
Experiments
feedback
Humanities and Social Sciences
Incentives
Individual behaviour
Management science
Motivation
Organizational behavior
Organizational behaviour
Positive feedback
Public sector
R&D
ranking
Research & development
Sabotage
status
Studies
Symbolism
Tournaments & championships
Wages
Wages & salaries
Western Europe
Workers
Workplaces
United States
France
Status
feedback
experiment
sabotage
doping
ranking
competitive preferences
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Summary:Unethical behavior within organizations is not rare. We investigate experimentally the role of status-seeking behavior in sabotage and cheating activities aiming at improving one's performance ranking in a flat-wage environment. We find that average effort is higher when individuals are informed about their relative performance. However, ranking feedback also favors disreputable behavior. Some individuals do not hesitate to incur a cost to improve their rank by sabotaging others' work or by increasing artificially their own performance. Introducing sabotage opportunities has a strong detrimental effect on performance. Therefore, ranking incentives should be used with care. Inducing group identity discourages sabotage among peers but increases in-group rivalry. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1747 . This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 23
ISSN:0025-1909
1526-5501
DOI:10.1287/mnsc.2013.1747