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Many companies use competition for either monetary or non-monetary rewards to induce employee effort. Pitting employees against each other in a competition could come at a thus far insufficiently considered cost of leading to lower employee cooperation. The authors examine how competition for monetary rewards in the form of tournament incentives or non-monetary rewards in the form of standing in uncompensated public rankings affects employee cooperation with former competitors in a subsequent task where the extent of the cooperation does not affect the welfare or social standing of the person deciding to cooperate. The authors hypothesize that competition in the first task negatively affects cooperation in the second task. The authors further predict that competition leads to psychological pressure, which mediates differences in cooperation. The results support the authors’ hypotheses. In addition, the authors find that the decrease in cooperation results from the behavior of low performers, whereas cooperation by high performers is not affected. The findings are important because they show that inducing effort in one dimension leads to an unintended cost in the form of lower cooperation in another dimension. This cost occurs for both types of competition – competition for monetary payoffs and for non-monetary rewards. Ultimately, the size of this cost depends on the marginal benefit from any cooperation of low performers.

We examine the effect of peer honesty on focal manager honesty in a budget reporting setting. We disclose peer honesty to the focal manager at three levels: no, partial, and full disclosure of the reporting behavior of the other managers in the focal managers’ cohort. In partial disclosure, only the reports of the least honest peers are disclosed to the focal manager. In full disclosure, all managers’ reports in the cohort are disclosed to the focal manager. We predict and find that disclosure of other managers’ reports leads to less honesty compared to the absence of disclosure. We show that disclosure changes the focal manager’s perceptions of what constitutes acceptable reporting behavior, such that reporting more dishonestly becomes more acceptable. Our results have implications for understanding fraud dynamics and have practical implications for the design of control systems, as they suggest that managers will use peer dishonesty to justify their own dishonesty, even when they know that only some of their peers report dishonestly.

Purpose – Harnessing the advantage of mobile information technology (IT) solutions at the point of care and contributing to patients' safety by involving them.

Design/methodology/approach – International collaboration between specialists in health communication processes and information management and systems.

Methods used – Case studies, design science.

Findings – User-friendly portable IT applications going beyond documentation of patient records and administration require an understanding of complex communication processes between patients and the different caregivers. Home care increasingly faces structural deficits to be mitigated by integration of IT solutions. Platforms chosen in combination with services should be well established. How to implement this must be scrutinized by comprehensive research as initiated here. Preliminary results indicate potentials for novel mobile applications.

Practical implications – Contribution to increasing patients' safety by developing mobile solutions to support health care. Those may also contribute to cost savings in health care.

Social implications – Health care experiences an increasing significance for Western industrialized countries because of demographic developments. Care generally shifts from inpatient to outpatient settings; the global shortage of qualified nurses becomes even more prevailing. More support, among others by IT and enhanced interprofessional communication, is demanded for an improved quality and efficiency of care processes.

Originality/value – Mutual approach benefits from the partner's understanding of complex interactions among clinicians, health services, and patients: the ability to design, monitor, and evaluate research strategies integrating care (information) needs is invaluable when applying creative technology solutions within health care domain.

To better detect potential audit issues, since 2010, the Internal Revenue Service has required firms to file a separate schedule individually disclosing each of their uncertain tax positions (UTPs). This study uses an experiment to examine how this increase in detection risk from the newly created IRS schedule influences both a firm’s tax reporting and financial reporting concurrently. We find that corporate tax professionals were more likely to recommend an UTP when their firm had a strong UTP reporting quality, regardless of the detection risk level of the reporting environment. However, we find an interaction effect for the recording of the tax reserve. In a low detection risk environment, corporate tax professionals recorded a higher (lower) tax reserve when their firm had a weak (strong) UTP reporting quality. However, in a high detection risk environment, corporate tax professionals recorded a lower (higher) tax reserve when their firm had a weak (strong) UTP reporting quality. Overall, the results provide insight into the dual nature of UTP reporting and the determinants that influence each reporting behavior.