Competition Between Organizational Groups: Its Impact on Altruistic and Antisocial Motivations

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Goette, Lorenz; Huffman, David; Meier, Stephan; Sutter, Matthias
• 署名单位: University of Lausanne; Swarthmore College; Columbia University; University of Innsbruck; University of Gothenburg
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.1110.1466
• 发表日期: 2012
• 页码: 948-960
• 关键词: Group decisions; COOPERATION; PUNISHMENT; experiment; army

摘要

Firms are often organized into groups. Group membership has been shown empirically to have positive effects, in the form of increased prosocial behavior toward in-group members. This includes an enhanced willingness to engage in altruistic punishment of inefficient defection. Our paper provides evidence of a dark side of group membership. In the presence of cues of competition between groups, a taste for harming the out-group emerges: punishment ceases to serve a norm enforcement function, and instead, out-group members are punished harder and regardless of whether they cooperate or defect. Our results point to a mechanism that might help explain previous mixed results on the social value of punishment, and they contribute to understanding the sources of conflict between groups. They also point to an important trade-off for firms: introducing competition enhances within-group efficiency but also generates costly between-group conflict.