Mitigating Gig and Remote Worker Misconduct: Evidence from a Real Effort Experiment
成果类型：
Article
署名作者：
Burbano, Vanessa C.; Chiles, Bennett
署名单位：
Columbia University
刊物名称：
ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
ISSN/ISSBN：
1047-7039
DOI：
10.1287/orsc.2021.1488
发表日期：
2022
页码：
1273-1299
关键词：
unethical behavior
employee misconduct
employee cheating
employee governance
ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES
Corporate social responsibility
ethics code
monitoring
human resource management
strategic human resources management
Social responsibility
strategy and policy
governance and control
ETHICS
摘要：
Employee misconduct is costly to organizations and has the potential to be even more common in gig and remote work contexts, in which workers are physically distant fromtheir employers. There is, thus, a need for scholars to better understand what employers can do to mitigate misconduct in these nontraditional work environments, particularly as the prevalence of such work environments is increasing. We combine an agency perspective with a behavioral relationship-based perspective to consider two avenues through which gig employers can potentially mitigate misconduct: (1) through the communication of organizational values and (2) through the credible threat of monitoring. We implement a real effort experiment in a gig work context that enables us to cleanly observe misconduct. Consistent with our theory, we present causal evidence that communication of organizational values, both externally facing in the form of social/environmental responsibility and internally facing in the form of an employee ethics code, decreases misconduct. This effect, however, is largely negated when workers are informed that they are being monitored. We provide suggestive evidence that this crowding out is due to a decrease in perceived trust that results from the threat of monitoring. Our results have important theoretical implications for research on employee misconduct and shed light on the trade-offs associated with various potential policy solutions.