The influence of goal setting on individual unethical behavior: Evidence from experimental and empirical studies

Because goal setting can stimulate individual’s internal motivation, many managers begin to recognize the importance of guiding individual’s behavior, and contributing to the achievement of organizational goals. When emphasizing the positive influences of goal setting, most researchers or practitioners to some extent ignore its possible negative impacts. In view of this, this research tries to explore the potential mechanism of the relationship between goal setting and employee’s unethical behavior. In the first part, the research analyzes why it is necessary and important to examine goal setting’s influence on employee unethical behavior. With the rapid development of economy, organizations and employees strive to pursue performance goals, such as innovation performance, relationship performance, learning performance and so on. However, in the process of setting and achieving goals, they are more likely to ignore moral norms, thus fueling unethical behavior. Given that unethical behavior has become a common phenomenon in organizations, practitioners attempt to reduce employee’s unethical behavior by improving leader behavior, organizatonal culture and individual’s moral cognitive ability. In fact, most of previous studies ignored the following questions: Does goal setting have great impact on employee’s unethcial behavior? Whether the organization can avoid or reduce the generation of employee’s unethical behavior by improving goal setting? Therefore, it is vital to explore the potential mechanism of the goal-setting employee’s unethical behaviors. In the second part, based on the review of goal-setting theory, this research provides a detailed explanation for the goal-setting unethical behavior relationship from the perspective of resource limitation theory and the characteristics of goal-setting dimensions. We propose hypotheses. Hypothesis 1a is that goal difficulty is positively related to employee unethical behavior. Hypothesis 1b is that goal specificity is positively related to employee unethical behavior. Hypothesis 1c is that participating in setting goals is negatively related to employee unethical behavior. Hypothesis 2a is that employee moral disengagement mediates the positive relationship between goal difficulty and employee unethical behavior. Hypothesis 2b is that employee moral disengagement mediates the positive relationship between goal specificity and employee unethical behavior. Hypothesis 2c is that employee’s moral disengagement mediates the negative relationship between participation in setting goals and employee’s unethical behavior. Finally, we give a complete theoretical framework. In the third part, to ensure the accuracy of our findings, this research tests the theoretical framework mentioned above by using the combination of experimental and empirical studies. In Study 1, 59 ACCA professional undergraduate students were recruited to participate in an experiemnt. This experiment explored whether goal difficulty among goal setting theory affects individual unethical behavior in the research. The experimental results show that the mean unethical behavior in the difficult target group is significantly higher than that in the general target group. Moreover, the proportion of individuals who conduct unethical behaviors in the difficult target group is significantly higher than that in the general target group. In short, goal difficulty affects individual unethical behavior. Namely, the higher the goal difficulty, the higher the probability that individuals conduct unethical behavior is. Conversely, the lower the goal difficulty the lower the probability is. Furthermore, in Study 2, we adopt the multi-stage survey and collect data from 128 employees in order to comprehens ively and systematically study the relationship between goal setting and employees5 unethical behavior. The results show that: (1) The difficulty and specificity of goal have significantly positive influence on employees5 unethical behavior, whereas participation in setting goals has significantly negative influence on employees5 unethical behavior. (2) Employees5 moral disengagement completely mediates the relationship betwwen goal difficulty/goal specificity and employees5 unethical behavior. Specifically, goal difficulty has significantly positive influence on employees5 unethical behavior by stimulating employees’ moral disengagement, whereas participating in setting goals has significantly negative influence on employees’ unethical behavior by reducing employees5 moral disengagement. In the fourth part, we analyze the theoretical significance of this study. Above all, based on a new theoretical perspective of resource limitation theory, we explain how goal setting influences employee 5s unethical behavior. This, to some extent, extends the theoretical study about the goal s etting-unethical behavior relationship. In addition, drawing on this theory, the research fUrther reveals the “black box” (i.e., potential mechanism) of the goal-setting unethical behavior relationship employee moral disengagement, thus extending the theoretical study about the potential mechanism of this relationship. Our findings also illustrate that goal setting woul have negative impact on organizations. Target management system, to a certain extent, may be problematic or imperfect. This plays important guiding roles in how to set a more reasonable goal. In summary, the research has potential significance and practical values for leaders to reasonably and effectively conduct goal setting.