英語翻譯
Our results also suggest that deception itself can facilitate self-justification.In our study,people were far more likely to both misrepresent their performance (in a way that justified taking unearned money) and then take unearned money than they were to simply take unearned money.
In practice,a number of factors are likely to moderate the relationship between goal setting and unethical behavior.For example,in our study we emphasized participant anonymity.This aspect of our design simulated many organizational settings,such as that of a consultant reporting the number of hours she has worked.In many other settings,however,an individual’s productivity is more transparent,and people are held accountable for specific outcomes.In these contexts,goal setting may not significantly increase unethical behavior.
Another potential moderator of the relationship between goal setting and unethical behavior is the source of a goal.In this experiment we only considered the influence of exogenous goals.Quite possibly,self-generated goals would influence unethical behavior differently.
Future work should also examine the effects of goal failure more broadly.Unlike prior goal setting work,this study imposed a one-minute limit on the word creation task.This aspect of our design increased the likelihood of goal failure but,notably,it also weakened the link between goal setting and performance.Prior work has shown that goal setting impacts performance by motivating people to work more persistently (see Locke & Latham,1990),and other scholars who have used similar word creation tasks with longer time limits (such as three minutes) have documented significant relationships between goal setting and performance (Vance& Colella,1990).
In studying unethical behavior,one important issue to disentangle is whether the type of behavior we observed results from careless mistakes or deliberate actions.Importantly,our pattern of results supports the proposition that many of these cases were calculated lies.First,we found that the over- and understatement scores were not significantly different from each other for the do-your-best condition participants,who had no incentive to overstate performance.Second,we found that the overstatement scores systematically varied across the three experimental conditions in a manner consistent with our thesis.That is,although there may have been some careless overstatements,the systematic pattern of our results cannot be explained by random chance.