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Can We Commit Future Managers to Honesty?

In a competitive business environment, dishonesty can pay. Self-interested executives and managers can have incentive to shade the truth for personal gain. In response, the business community has considered how to commit these executives and managers to a higher ethical standard. The MBA Oath and th...

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Autores principales: Jacquemet, Nicolas, Luchini, Stéphane, Rosaz, Julie, Shogren, Jason F.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8414966/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34484050
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.701627
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author Jacquemet, Nicolas
Luchini, Stéphane
Rosaz, Julie
Shogren, Jason F.
author_facet Jacquemet, Nicolas
Luchini, Stéphane
Rosaz, Julie
Shogren, Jason F.
author_sort Jacquemet, Nicolas
collection PubMed
description In a competitive business environment, dishonesty can pay. Self-interested executives and managers can have incentive to shade the truth for personal gain. In response, the business community has considered how to commit these executives and managers to a higher ethical standard. The MBA Oath and the Dutch Bankers Oath are examples of such a commitment device. The question we test herein is whether the oath can be used as an effective form of ethics management for future executives/managers—who for our experiment we recruited from a leading French business school—by actually improving their honesty. Using a classic Sender-Receiver strategic game experiment, we reinforce professional identity by pre-selecting the group to which Receivers belong. This allows us to determine whether taking the oath deters lying among future managers. Our results suggest “yes and no.” We observe that these future executives/managers who took a solemn honesty oath as a Sender were (a) significantly more likely to tell the truth when the lie was detrimental to the Receiver, but (b) were not more likely to tell the truth when the lie was mutually beneficial to both the Sender and Receiver. A joint product of our design is our ability to measure in-group bias in lying behavior in our population of subjects (comparing behavior of subjects in the same and different business schools). The experiment provides clear evidence of a lack of such bias.
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spelling pubmed-84149662021-09-04 Can We Commit Future Managers to Honesty? Jacquemet, Nicolas Luchini, Stéphane Rosaz, Julie Shogren, Jason F. Front Psychol Psychology In a competitive business environment, dishonesty can pay. Self-interested executives and managers can have incentive to shade the truth for personal gain. In response, the business community has considered how to commit these executives and managers to a higher ethical standard. The MBA Oath and the Dutch Bankers Oath are examples of such a commitment device. The question we test herein is whether the oath can be used as an effective form of ethics management for future executives/managers—who for our experiment we recruited from a leading French business school—by actually improving their honesty. Using a classic Sender-Receiver strategic game experiment, we reinforce professional identity by pre-selecting the group to which Receivers belong. This allows us to determine whether taking the oath deters lying among future managers. Our results suggest “yes and no.” We observe that these future executives/managers who took a solemn honesty oath as a Sender were (a) significantly more likely to tell the truth when the lie was detrimental to the Receiver, but (b) were not more likely to tell the truth when the lie was mutually beneficial to both the Sender and Receiver. A joint product of our design is our ability to measure in-group bias in lying behavior in our population of subjects (comparing behavior of subjects in the same and different business schools). The experiment provides clear evidence of a lack of such bias. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-08-13 /pmc/articles/PMC8414966/ /pubmed/34484050 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.701627 Text en Copyright © 2021 Jacquemet, Luchini, Rosaz and Shogren. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Jacquemet, Nicolas
Luchini, Stéphane
Rosaz, Julie
Shogren, Jason F.
Can We Commit Future Managers to Honesty?
title Can We Commit Future Managers to Honesty?
title_full Can We Commit Future Managers to Honesty?
title_fullStr Can We Commit Future Managers to Honesty?
title_full_unstemmed Can We Commit Future Managers to Honesty?
title_short Can We Commit Future Managers to Honesty?
title_sort can we commit future managers to honesty?
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8414966/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34484050
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.701627
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