by Morela Hernandez
View original publication on MITSloan
Although we might hope that leaders in business environments will embrace their decision-making responsibilities with a clear head and an open heart, empirical research has shown otherwise. Instead, business leaders are often selfish. Access to resources in many organizations is a moving target, leaving many managers feeling protective of what’s theirs. And when they take more than their fair share — extra resources for themselves at the expense of others — they often do it because they honestly think they are entitled to these resources and believe they have earned the right to take more.
Where does this kind of entitlement come from?
As I’ve tried to reconcile current political events — such as the European Union’s reaction to Brexit, the continuing global refugee crisis, and the ongoing debates in the United States about tax and health care reform — with scholarly work on ambiguity and decision-making, I’ve come to think that feeling entitled to a larger share of a resource might come not from objective assessments of reality but rather from what social scientists call motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning occurs when people “selectively notice, encode, and retain information that is consistent with their desires.” People use this kind of reasoning to reach conclusions that help them support their self-serving beliefs. After all, reasoning, it has been said, “was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.”
Understanding the effects of self-serving beliefs is a tricky business. In the last decade of research in behavioral ethics, for instance, scholars have moved away from a “bad apples” approach in which only people with poor moral characteristics are deemed likely to behave unethically. Instead, researchers have examined how people can engage in self-serving behaviors while convinced of the rightness and fairness of doing so. Few studies, however, have explored the circumstances in which this type of selfishness — one that comes with a sense of entitlement and justification — is likely to arise.
Working alongside my colleague Laura Noval of the Imperial College Business School in London, we sought to understand how organizations enable self-serving behavior. Specifically, we investigated how certain contextual and individual characteristics can facilitate motivated reasoning aimed at justifying self-serving decisions.
We explored this issue through two experimental studies, one using a hypothetical business decision-making scenario (in which 395 people participated, 52% women) and the other using a behavioral task in the laboratory (in which 239 people participated, 52% women). In both studies, we assigned participants to conditions in which they received either identical performance information with respect to another party (strong, unambiguous context), or in which they and the other party were favored by different performance criteria (weak, ambiguous context). In the latter case, participants could use motivated reasoning to convince themselves that their own performance criterion was more relevant for the task at hand, thereby convincing themselves that they deserved larger shares of the resource.
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