Team Goal Incentives and Individual Lying Behavior

Julian Conrads, Mischa Ellenberger, Bernd Irlenbusch, Elia Nora Ohms, Rainer Rilke and Gari Walkowitz ()

No 17-02, WHU Working Paper Series - Economics Group from WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management

Abstract: In this article we examine the influence of two goal compensation schemes on lying behavior. Based on the die rolling task of Fischbacher/Föllmi-Heusi (2013), we apply an individual goal incentive scheme and a team goal incentive scheme. In both settings individuals receive a fixed bonus when attaining the goal. We find that under team goal incentives subjects are less inclined to over-report production outputs beyond the amount which is on average necessary for goal attainment. Investigating subjects’ beliefs on their team mates’ behavior under team goal incentives reveals that subjects who either believe that lying is not profitable (i.e., the team goal cannot be reached with a lie) or not absolutely necessary (i.e., there is a good chance that the team goal can also be reached without lying) tend to be honest. We also find that subjects who believe that the team goal has already been reached by their team mates tend to over-report production outputs. Across treatments, women are found to be more honest than men. Subjects’ personality is not associated with reported production outputs. Our work contributes to previous research on how different compensation schemes affect unethical behavior in organizational settings.

Keywords: Compensation schemes; Lying; Teams; Goals; Individual differences; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C92 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2017-03-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published, Die Betriebswirtschaft 76, 2016

Downloads: (external link)
https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hbz:992-opus4-4054 First version, 2017 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:whu:wpaper:17-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in WHU Working Paper Series - Economics Group from WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Rainer Michael Rilke ().