Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
5-2018
Abstract
This paper explains and tests empirically why people employed in product promotion are less willing to trust others. Product promotion is a prototypical setting in which employees are mandated to express attitudes that are often not fully sincere. On the basis of social projection theory, we predicted that organizational agents mandated to express insincere attitudes project their self-perceived dishonesty onto others and thus become more distrustful. An initial large-scale, multi-country field study found that individuals employed in jobs requiring product promotion were less trusting than individuals employed in other jobs—particularly jobs in which honesty is highly expected. We then conducted two experiments in which people were tasked with promoting low-quality products and either were allowed to be honest or were asked to be positive (as would be expected of most salespeople). We found that mandated attitude expression reduced willingness to trust, and this effect was mediated by a decrease in the perceived honesty of the self, which, in turn, reduced the perceived honesty of other people. Our research suggests that the widely used practice of mandating attitude expression has the effect of undermining an essential ingredient of economic functioning—trust.
Keywords
trust, mandated attitude expression, product promotion, social projection
Discipline
Organizational Behavior and Theory
Research Areas
Organisational Behaviour and Human Resources
Publication
Organization Science
Volume
29
Issue
3
First Page
418
Last Page
431
ISSN
1047-7039
Identifier
10.1287/orsc.2017.1190
Publisher
INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences)
Citation
PITESA, Marko; GOH, Zen; and THAU, Stefan.
Mandates of dishonesty: The psychological and social costs of mandated attitude expression. (2018). Organization Science. 29, (3), 418-431.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/5909
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1190