About employees’ lying behavior and self-awareness

Max, S; Chang, K; Celse, J

Abstract

As employees’ lying behavior is found to benefit the employee but bring hefty cost to the organisation, managers are keen to apply anti-lying strategies in their management practice and, in particular, the role of self-awareness in lying intervention has drawn public attention. The current research has adopted theories to analyse whether self-awareness refrains lying behavior, and discuss what might be the mechanism behind such refraining effect. Part-time employees are recruited as research participants and their responses are analysed via dice-under-cup games in the laboratory. Unlike prior studies which praise the merits of self-awareness, the current research has found that self-awareness does not restrain lying occurrence, and that self-awareness does not encourage participants to confess to lying either. Participants actually lie more when they believe other players are lying. The current research is the first of its kind to examine whether self-awareness actually reduces lying tendency and hence the findings are vital to the employee lying intervention. Research implications on practice and knowledge advancement are discussed.

• Working Paper Type: Working Paper
• Online Publication Date: Sep 4, 2018
• Publication Date: Sep 4, 2018
• Deposit Date: Sep 4, 2018