of U.S. companies depend on group-based work, and more than half of all U.S. employees currently spend at least part of their day working in a group setting.1 Try to count the number of meetings, project teams, and collaborative experiences you’ve had over the last six months, and you will quickly realize how many working hours these group activities consume. Group work also plays a prominent role in education. For example, the majority of MBA students’ assignments consist of group-based tasks, and many undergraduate classes also require group-based projects.
In general, people tend to believe that working in groups has a positive influence on outcomes and that it increases the overall quality of decisions.2 (In fact, much research has shown that collaboration can decrease the quality of decisions. But that’s a topic for another time.) In general, the belief is that there is little to lose and everything to gain from collaboration—including encouraging a sense of camaraderie, increasing the level of fun at work, and benefitting from sharing and developing new ideas—all of which add up to more motivated and effective employees. What’s not to love?
A FEW YEARS ago, in one of my graduate classes, I lectured about some of my research related to conflicts of interest (see chapter 3, “Blinded by Our Own Motivations”). After class, a student (I’ll call her Jennifer) told me that the discussion had struck a chord with her. It reminded her of an incident that had taken place a few years earlier, when she was working as a certified public accountant (CPA) for a large accounting firm.
Jennifer told me that her job had been to produce the annual reports, proxy statements, and other documents that would inform shareholders about the state of their companies’ affairs. One day her boss asked her to have her team prepare a report for the annual shareholders’ meeting of one of their larger clients. The task involved going over all of the client’s financial statements and determining the company’s financial standing. It was a large responsibility, and Jennifer and her team worked hard to put together a comprehensive and detailed report that was honest and realistic. She did her best to prepare the report as accurately as possible, without, for example, overclaiming the company’s profits or delaying reporting any losses to the next accounting year. She then left the draft of the report on her boss’s desk, looking forward (somewhat anxiously) to his feedback.
Later that day, Jennifer got the report back with a note from her boss. It read, “I don’t like these numbers. Please gather your team and get me a revised version by next Wednesday.” Now, there are many reasons why her boss might not have “liked” the numbers, and it wasn’t entirely clear to her what he meant. Moreover, not “liking” the numbers is an entirely different matter from the numbers being wrong—which was never implied. A multitude of questions ran through Jennifer’s head: “What exactly did he want? How different should I make the numbers? Half a percent? One percent? Five percent?” She also didn’t understand who was going to be accountable for any of the “improvements” she made. If the revisions turned out to be overly optimistic and someone was going to take the blame for it down the road, would it be her boss or her?
THE PROFESSION OF accounting is itself a somewhat equivocal trade. Sure, there are some clear-cut rules. But then there is a vaguely titled body of suggestions—known as Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)—that accountants are supposed to follow. These guidelines afford accountants substantial leeway; they are so general that there’s considerable variation in how accountants can interpret financial statements. (And often there are financial incentives to “bend” the guidelines to some degree.) For instance, one of the rules, “the principle of sincerity,” states that the accountant’s report should reflect the company’s financial status “in good faith.” That’s all well and good, but “in good faith” is both excessively vague and extremely subjective. Of course, not everything (in life or accounting) is precisely quantifiable, but “in good faith” begs a few questions: Does it mean that accountants can act in bad faith?* And toward whom is this good faith directed? The people who run the company? Those who would like the books to look impressive and profitable (which would increase their bonuses and compensation)? Or should it be directed toward the people who have invested in the company? Or is it about those who want a clear idea of the company’s financial condition?
Adding to the inherent complexity and ambiguity of her original task, Jennifer was now put under additional pressure by her boss. She’d prepared the initial report in what seemed to her to be good faith, but she realized that she was being asked to bend the accounting rules to some degree. Her boss wanted numbers that reflected more favorably upon the client company. After deliberating for a while, she concluded that she and her team should comply with his request; after all, he was her boss, and he certainly knew a lot more than she did about accounting, how to work with clients, and the client’s expectations. In the end, although Jennifer started the process with every intention of being as accurate as possible, she wound up going back to the drawing board, reviewing the statements, reworking the numbers, and returning with a “better” report. This time, her boss was satisfied.
AFTER JENNIFER TOLD me her story, I continued to think about her work environment and the effect that working on a team with her boss and teammates had on her decision to push the accounting envelope a bit further. Jennifer was certainly in the kind of situation that people frequently face in the workplace, but what really stood out for me was that in this case the cheating took place in the context of a team, which was different from anything we had studied before.
In all of our earlier experiments on cheating, one person alone made the decision to cheat (even if he or she was spurred along by a dishonest act of another person). But in Jennifer’s case, more than one person was directly involved, as is frequently the case in professional settings. In fact, it was clear to Jennifer that in addition to herself and her boss, her teammates would be affected by her actions. At the end of the year, the whole team would be evaluated together as a group—and their bonuses, raises, and future prospects were intertwined.
I started to wonder about the effects of collaboration on individual honesty. When we are part of a group, are we tempted to cheat more? Less? In other words, is a group setting conducive or destructive to honesty? This question is related to a topic we discussed in the previous chapter (“Cheating as an Infection”): whether it’s possible that people can “catch” cheating from one another. But social contagion and social dependency are different. It’s one thing to observe dishonest behavior in others and, based on that, alter our perceptions of what acceptable social norms are; it’s quite another if the financial welfare of others depends on us.
Let’s say you’re working on a project with your coworkers. You don’t necessarily observe them doing anything shady, but you know that they (and you) will benefit if you bend the rules a bit. Will you be more likely to do so if you know that they too will get something out of it? Jennifer’s account suggests that collaboration can cause us to take a few extra liberties with moral guidelines, but is this the case in general?
Before we take a tour of some experiments examining the impact of collaboration on cheating, let’s take a step back and think about possible positive and negative influences of teams and collaboration on our tendency to be dishonest.
Altruistic Cheating: Possible Costs of Collaboration
Work environments are socially complex, with multiple forces at play. Some of those forces might make it easy for group-based processes to turn collaborations into cheating opportunities in which individuals cheat to a higher degree because they realize that their actions can benefit people they like and care about.
Think about Jennifer again. Suppose she was a loyal person and liked to think of herself that way. Suppose further that she really liked her supervisor and team members and sincerely wanted to help them. Based on such considerations, she might have decided to fulfill her boss’s request or even take her report a step further—not because of any selfish reasons but out of concern for her boss’s well-being and deep regard for her team members. In her mind, “bad” numbers might get her boss and team members to fall out of favor with the client and the accounting company—meaning that Jennifer’s concern for her team might lead her to increase the magnitude of her
