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Recent research suggests that prosocial organizations are likely to have more prosocial employees, and that this match plays a significant role in organization contracting practices and productivity – for example, in government. Evidence suggests that selection plays a role: prosocial employees are more likely to join prosocial organizations. In this paper, we ask whether prosocial behavior increases with tenure in prosocial organizations. Using a unique sample of nearly 300 mid-career Indonesian public officials, we find that subjects with longer tenure in the public sector exhibit greater prosocial behavior.

Over the last decades, the accounting and control literature has featured much studying of and debate about the role and designing of incentives. Over the last year or so, the debate over incentives and bonuses has become a much more public one, as illustrated by the current public furor over bankers' bonuses and frequent calls to limit them and/or tax them more heavily. The public nature of the debate is new, but the emotional intensity is not; an intense emotionality has often characterized discussions of these subjects in print, as recently illustrated by a controversy between supporters and opponents of goal setting published in Academy of Management Perspectives.

This chapter tries to structure the debate by defining – and clarifying the interactions between – key components of the debate. I then review some – by no means all – of the evidence available in three streams of research: goal setting, self-determination theory, and economics. A surprisingly large number of commonalities emerge from this review. I then revisit in light of this review two accountability models I had introduced at a previous conference as well a forthcoming field study of the sophisticated approach developed by a successful multinational corporation.

Purpose – The controllability principle has attracted considerable attention in performance management research. Whereas this discussion hinges centrally on a conception of human motivation, findings from psychological motivation research on intrinsic motivation have not received attention yet. Addressing this research gap, this chapter analyzes the effect of perceived controllability on extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and thereby on work effort.

Methodology/approach – We conducted a vignette study with undergraduate students of an accounting course in a German University in early 2009. Each participant was confronted with a written description of a hypothetical business situation (a vignette) on which the participants should base their further answers. These vignettes also contained a description of a remuneration system. Among other things, the degree of this remuneration system's controllability was varied from vignette to vignette. After reading the vignette each participant was instructed to answer some questions regarding his/her willingness to exert additional effort in the described situational context and the motivational reasons behind this willingness.

Findings – The study exhibits that a lack of perceived controllability has a negative impact on extrinsic, but also on intrinsic, motivation and thereby on work effort.

Originality – The findings put the current discussion into a broader perspective, as they suggests that adherence to the principle of controllability is not only warranted given the impact on extrinsic motivation as discussed in large parts of the literature but also for intrinsic motivation.

Kerr's (1975) examination of the “folly of rewarding A while hoping for B” led him to encourage organizations to align reward system and desired employee behavior. Since then, much of the accounting and control literature has increasingly reduced the reward system to one of its components – incentive compensation plans – and has increasingly ceased to examine other behavioral levers used by corporations, thus implicitly or explicitly treating measurement and reward as a sufficient condition to obtain desired employee behavior. This chapter considers the complexity of the reward system (including its inevitable subjective dimension) and discusses its role, in connection with other important managerial levers, in corporations’ broader efforts to shape employee behavior. The chapter concludes with a review of literature streams in economics and psychology, suggesting that an intense incentive alignment approach may be self-fulfilling and hence counter-productive.

Purpose – This chapter reviews the challenges faced by top management teams as they strive to create corporate cultures that combine a high performance with a strong sense of integrity.

Methodology/approach – The chapter integrates diverse theories from organizational research and cognitive psychology, as well as published accounts of ethical breakdowns, to shed new light on the barriers to corporate integrity.

Findings – The chapter distinguishes between two major types of ethical breakdowns.

Conscious transgressions, where the individuals know what they should or should not do, but choose nonetheless to follow the unethical path, a decision that they then need to rationalize and which often places them on a slippery slope.

Unconscious transgressions, where the individuals do not even realize that they are making an inappropriate decision, as they fall prey to ethical fading or to other cognitive biases.

Practical implications – The chapter proposes that top management plays a key role in establishing a climate where employees can speak up, emphasizing the importance of all stakeholders, and investing in training to increase awareness of the cognitive biases that support transgressions.

Social implications – The chapter recommends that management educators must alert students more forcefully to the personal and organizational repercussions of “minor” ethical transgressions; increase student awareness of key cognitive concepts, including ethical fading and other mental biases; and highlight the possible dysfunctions of intuitive remedies, like incentives or rules and regulations.

Originality/value of chapter – The chapter provides a clearer analysis of the causes of ethical breakdowns, allowing for more effective prevention.

The literature on post-completion reviews (PCRs) either does not deal with the tying of PCRs to extrinsic rewards or provides scant theoretical reasoning or empirical analysis to back up its recommendations.

Based on research from psychology and empirical studies, the present chapter proposes that several effects of a PCR, which must be deemed rather dysfunctional, will increase when extrinsic rewards are linked to such a review. At the same time some possibly functional effects, however, are likely to remain constant. The propositions, therefore, call the usefulness of tying PCRs to rewards into question and call for further investigation.

Scholars have examined the importance of culture in entrepreneurship since at least the 1970s. Lounsbury and Glynn (2001) gave these efforts new impetus by explicitly theorizing entrepreneurship as a cultural process. In the intervening 20 years, work in this area has proliferated. To date, however, this work has emphasized the positive aspects of cultural entrepreneurship almost exclusively. Not all episodes of cultural entrepreneurship are positive, though, and not all entrepreneurial stories have a happy ending. Acknowledging this, we develop a framework for investigating the dark sides of cultural entrepreneurship. We posit four pathways through which cultural entrepreneurship might lead to negative outcomes. Along one dimension, we distinguish false promises and harmful practices. The second dimension differentiates between negative outcomes and negative spillovers. We illustrate our arguments with real-world examples, and discuss how our framework signals new research opportunities related to corruption and wrongdoing, as well as the potential for cultural entrepreneurship research to focus on authenticity as well as legitimacy.

This chapter conducts a systematic comparison of behavioral economics’s challenges to the standard accounts of economic behaviors within three dimensions: under risk, over time, and regarding other people. A new perspective on two underlying methodological issues, i.e., inter-disciplinarity and the positive/normative distinction, is proposed by following the entanglement thesis of Hilary Putnam, Vivian Walsh, and Amartya Sen. This thesis holds that facts, values, and conventions have inter-dependent meanings in science which can be understood by scrutinizing formal and ordinary language uses. The goal is to provide a broad and self-contained picture of how behavioral economics is changing the mainstream of economics.