an experimental investigation of the interactions ... - Vlerick Public

Researchers in psychology have paid enormous attention to the influence of descriptivesocial norms on behavior of individuals. Asch (1951), for instance, shows that individuals agree withthe wrong answers of the other members of their group and that this effect is strengthened whenthe other group members are unanimous and show greater discomfort with deviations from theirunanimous answer. In a more recent study, Goldstein et al. (2008) finds that hotel guests complymore with the towel-reuse rate of the other hotel guests who had previously stayed in their roomthan with the towel-reuse rates of reference groups that are considered to be important andpersonally meaningful to the hotel guests. Also analytical researchers have begun to incorporatesocial norms in their models and find that behavior deviates from the behavior that can be expectedwithout incorporating the social norms (Fisher and Huddart 2008).Previous research has been inconclusive about the importance of the economic structureand the descriptive social norms for employee decisions. Maltz and Kohli (1996), for instance, findsthat formal mechanisms are more important than the descriptive social norms in directing employeedecisions, while Anand et al. (2009) and Cousins et al. (2009) observe that the reverse is true. Priorstudies often consider formal mechanisms as one coherent construct or assume that different formalmechanisms are always aligned with the firm’s best interest (Doerr et al. 1996). Thus, prior studiesfail to incorporate that combinations of formal mechanisms can be either aligned or misaligned,which is an important characteristic of combinations of formal mechanisms (Roberts 2004).We predict an interactive effect between combinations of formal mechanisms anddescriptive social norms. Recall that misaligned combinations of formal mechanisms provideemployees with mixed cues about how they are expected to behave. In other words, misalignedcombinations of formal mechanisms lead to an ambiguous situation. Theory in social psychologyposits that individuals are most likely to use the evidence of other’s behavior to decide about themost effective course of action when the situation is novel, ambiguous or uncertain (Cialdini andTrost 1998; Sherif and Murphy 1936; Deutsch and Gerrard 1955). Furthermore, an importantpostulate of the focus theory of normative conduct is that norms are likely to influence behaviordirectly to the extent that it is salient (Cialdini et al. 1990; Goldstein and Cialdini 2010; Kallgren et al.2000). Accordingly, misaligned combinations of formal mechanisms will lead to ambiguity that willmake the firm’s descriptive social norms a more salient source of information. Therefore, we expectthat the influence of descriptive social norms on employee decision-making will be larger whencombinations of formal mechanisms are misaligned compared to aligned combinations of formalmechanisms.10