Reluctant to change: Self-enhancing responses to diverging performance measures

By Pino G. Audia, Sebastien Brion. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2007

177 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although there is extensive evidence that past performance influences the propensity to make changes, research on how decision makers respond to diverging performance measures has been sparse. This paper addresses this gap in an experimental and a field study in which we examine how decision makers respond to the ambiguity introduced by two diverging performance indicators of unequal importance. Both studies suggest that decision makers respond to diverging performance indicators in a self-enhancing manner. Decision makers gave importance to a secondary performance indicator only when it helped them maintain a sense of positive performance, that is, when a secondary performance measure was high and a primary performance measure was low. The results suggest that, in contexts in which decision makers are likely to experience diverging performance indicators, perceptions of success and the associated reluctance to make changes might be more pervasive than is often thought.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/73a9eced7c6d87c24a264cbbb75d407369a7c7dd

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Citations in the corpus

All Aspirations are not Created Equal: The Differential Effects of Historical and Social Aspirations on Acquisition Behavior (2014, background): “Thus, managers favor a performance indicator that allows them to view the firm in a more positive light, while disregarding more negative evaluations (Audia & Brion, 2007).”
Organizational Learning in Target Setting (2017, background): “…and performance feedback influence a variety of organizational decisions, such as strategic behavior, risk taking, and the propensity to make changes (Audia & Brion, 2007; Baum et al., 2005; Greve, 2003, 2008; Sorenson, 2003), which, in turn, influences subsequent performance (Shinkle, 2012).”
Disentangling Risk and Change (2015, background): “Our findings may also be less clear when the metrics used for comparison are more contested and when units propose metrics that reflect more favorably on themselves, e.g., for self-enhancement (Audia and Brion, 2007; Jordan and Audia, 2012).”
Managerial Risk Taking (2016, unknown): “Addressing such questions might require more novel methodology than that currently employed by most BTOF research, such as experimental methods (e.g., Audia & Brion, 2007).”
Contradictory yet Coherent? Inconsistency in Performance Feedback and R&D Investment Change (2018, background): “Moreover, the ambiguous nature of inconsistent performance feedback makes it a situation in which decision makers will be prone to selfenhancement (Audia & Brion, 2007).”
The Fog of Feedback: Ambiguity and Firm Responses to Multiple Aspiration Levels (2015, background): “…of strategic actions: organizational change (Greve, 1998; Lant and Hewlin, 2002), strategic positioning (Audia, Locke, and Smith, 2000; Park, 2007), corporate transactions (Haleblian and Rajagopalan, 2005; Shimizu, 2007), and new product introductions (Audia and Brion, 2007; Gaba and Joseph, 2013).”
Balancing on the Creative Highwire (2016, background): “Theories of self-enhancement and motivated reasoning suggest that creators are likely to focus on self-serving justifications for why their ideas are likely to succeed and ignore reasoning to the contrary (e.g., Kunda, 1990; Pfeffer and Fong, 2005; Audia and Brion, 2007; KC, Staats, and Gino, 2013).”
Organizational responses to performance feedback: A meta-analytic review (2019, background): “In contrast, social aspirations arise from the performance of peer firms, where organizations compare their own performance with peer performance (Audia and Brion, 2007).”
In the Horns of the Dilemma: Socioemotional Wealth, Financial Wealth, and Acquisitions in Family Firms (2018, background): “…that even within a dominant coalition (eventually even with the dominant family principal), tension and bargaining exist among competing goals and performance indicators, with the attention focus and preferences changing depending on circumstances (Audia & Brion, 2007; Nordqvist & Melin, 2010).”
Aspirations, Innovation, and Corporate Venture Capital: A Behavioral Perspective (2012, unknown): “, 2010) and others the historical (Audia and Brion, 2007); still others report equivalence (Iyer and Miller, 2008).”
Organizational Aspirations, Reference Points, and Goals (2012, background): “Fourth, researchers are only beginning to attempt to integrate concepts and frameworks from other theories (Audia & Brion, 2007; Mishina et al., 2010).”