Motivated to disengage: The ethical consequences of goal commitment and moral disengagement in goal setting

• Author: Hudson Sessions,David T. Welsh,Niharika Garud,Michael D. Baer
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2467
• Date: 01 September 2020

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Motivated to disengage: The ethical consequences of goal

commitment and moral disengagement in goal setting

David T. Welsh

1

| Michael D. Baer

1

| Hudson Sessions

2

| Niharika Garud

3

1

Department of Management & Entrepreneurship, W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A.

2

Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, U.S.A.

3

Department of Management, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Correspondence

David T. Welsh, Department of

Management & Entrepreneurship, W. P. Carey

School of Business, Arizona State University,

P.O.Box 874006, Tempe, AZ 85287-4006,

USA.

Email: davidwelsh@asu.edu

Summary

A growing literature has suggested that high performance goals can have unintended

consequences within organizations as employees engage in unethical behavior to

achieve outcomes associated with goal attainment. Extending research on the dark

side of goal setting, we suggest that high performance goals not only create a desire

to achieve a particular outcome but also alter moral reasoning processes related to

goal attainment. Integrating goal-setting theory with motivated moral reasoning, we

hypothesize an indirect effect of high performance goals on unethical behavior via

state moral disengagement. We also examine goal commitment—which tends to

amplify the relationship between high goals and performance—as a key boundary

condition associated with this indirect effect. We build this conditional indirect effect

model across three studies conducted in the field and the laboratory. Our results pro-

vide new insight into both when and why high goals can facilitate moral disengage-

ment and unethical behavior within organizations.

KEYWORDS

behavioral ethics, goal commitment, goal setting, moral disengagement, unethical behavior

1|INTRODUCTION

With over 1,000 studies demonstrating that high goals increase per-

formance (Locke & Latham, 2013), it is not surprising that scholars

and organizations would view goal setting in a positive light. Indeed,

goal-setting theory has been called the most important theory in the

field of organizational behavior (Miner, 2003).

1

Yet, in recent years,

the media has highlighted numerous scandals in which commitment to

high goals drove employees to behave unethically (Glazer, 2016;

McGregor, 2016). In addition, there has been growing interest in

understanding smaller but more prevalent instances of unethical

behavior in pursuit of high personal goals, such as students cheating

to earn higher grades (Pérez-Peña, 2012; Simmons, 2018). As a result,

it has become increasingly important to understand the mechanisms

through which high performance goals increase unethical behavior.

To date, the nascent literature examining the dark side of perfor-

mance goals has largely assumed that employees engage in unethical

behavior to achieve their goals in order to obtain potential rewards

associated with goal attainment (e.g., Cadsby, Song, & Tapon, 2010;

Schweitzer, Ordóñez, & Douma, 2004). We argue that this perspec-

tive provides an incomplete understanding of the process through

which goals influence unethicality. Drawing on Ditto, Pizarro, and

Tannenbaum's (2009) theory of motivated moral reasoning, we sug-

gest that high goals can alter how individuals perceive questionable

1

Although there are a number of theoretical perspectives related to motivation and personal

goals (e.g., Deci & Ryan, 2000; Dweck, 1986; Elliot & Sheldon, 1998), this manuscript focuses

specifically on performance goals as conceptualized in goal-setting theory (Locke &

Latham, 1990, 2002).

Received: 15 March 2019 Revised: 14 May 2020 Accepted: 19 June 2020

DOI: 10.1002/job.2467

J Organ Behav. 2020;41:663–677. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 663