Understanding the Ethical Cost of Organizational Goal-Setting: A Review and Theory Development

By Adam Barsky. 2008

216 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3745a25811e23e9ab57da5e1fbf036ebb7d1c7ba

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Information Systems and Management

1. Francesca Gino
2. Celia Moore
3. Max H. Bazerman
4. Adam D. Galinsky
5. Maurice E. Schweitzer
6. Lisa D. Ordóñez
7. Adam Barsky
8. David T. Welsh

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Francesca Gino
2. Celia Moore
3. Lisa D. Ordóñez
4. David T. Welsh
5. Andrew M. Carton
6. Adam Barsky
7. Max H. Bazerman
8. Maurice E. Schweitzer

Citations in the corpus

• Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Overprescribing Goal Setting (2009, background): “Barsky (2007) argues that goal setting impedes ethical decision making by making it harder for employees to recognize ethical issues and easier for them to rationalize unethical behavior.”
• Investigating the Effects of Moral Disengagement and Participation on Unethical Work Behavior (2011, background): “Thus, regardless of the true intent of the goal to improve performance, an employee may understand that they should do whatever it takes to attain the goal, even act unethically ( Barsky 2008 ).”
• Ethically adrift: How others pull our moral compass from true North, and how we can fix it (2013, background): “…2010; Spranca, Minsk, & Baron, 1991); (6) we unconsciously prioritize self-serving over pro-social interests (Bersoff, 1999a; Tenbrunsel, 1998); and (7) we value non-moral goals more than moral ones (Barsky, 2008; Ordóñez, Schweitzer, Galinsky, & Bazerman, 2009; Schweitzer, Ordóñez, & Douma, 2004).”
• The influence of supervisor bottom-line mentality and employee bottom-line mentality on leader-member exchange and subsequent employee performance (2019, unknown): “Until recently, research on BLM was largely conceptual (Barsky, 2008; Callahan, 2004; Kerr, 1975; Sims, 1992; Wolfe, 1988).”
• THE PARADOX OF STRETCH GOALS: ORGANIZATIONS IN PURSUIT OF THE SEEMINGLY IMPOSSIBLE (2011, background): “While we have focused on the organization level of analysis, we wish to point out some findings at the individual level pertaining to the unintended negative consequences of goal setting, with a particular focus on how goals can induce unethical behavior (Barsky, 2008; Jensen, 2003; Locke, 2004; Ord”
• The dark side of consecutive high performance goals: Linking goal setting, depletion, and unethical behavior (2014, background): “Barsky (2008) suggests that performance goals may also increase unethical behavior by creating high cognitive loads that focus mental resources on goal attainment rather than moral standards.”
• Conscience without cognition: The effects of subconscious priming on ethical behavior (2014, background): “Integrating goal-setting theory with self-concept maintenance theory, recent research has suggested that performance goals can divert a person’s attention from their moral standards, reduce their propensity to categorize morally ambiguous situations as unethical (Barsky, 2008), and increase unethica”
• The Effects of Ethical Codes on Ethical Perceptions of Actions Toward Stakeholders (2010, background): “Ethical lapses by officers or employees of a firm can cause severe damage to the reputation of the firm, and in some cases can cause the firm’s demise (Barsky, 2008).”