组织延展性目标的黑暗面研究:基于心理许可 理论的一个被调节的中介模型

With the increasingly fierce competition, organizations urgently need to innovate and improve performance. Therefore, organizations motivate employees through setting difficult goals. Stretch goals, seemingly impossible goals, are widely used by many organizations. Stretch goals require employees to “think outside the box” and promote new ways of thinking and acting, which effectively stimulates innovation and improves performance. In recent years, however, many corporate ethics scandals caused by stretch goals have attracted increasing attentions from scholars and managers. These phenomena suggest that stretch goals may have some unintended consequences, in particular unethical behavior. Considering the widespread use of stretch goals in the organization and the harm of unethical behavior to the organization and society, it is necessary to examine how and when stretch goals may lead to employees′ unethical behavior. In practice, organizations can effectively use stretch goals to motivate employees while avoiding the ethical costs they may cause. Existing studies have preliminarily explored the relationship between stretch goals and unethical behavior. However, up to now, few studies have thoroughly investigated the mediating mechanisms and boundary conditions of the relationship between stretch goals and unethical behavior. To fill these research gaps, this study draws on psychological licensing theory, and explores the relationship between stretch goals and unethical behavior. This study also identifies psychological entitlement as the mediator of this relationship. Furthermore, given the extreme difficulty and extreme novelty of stretch goals, this study also examines the moderating role of employees′ creative self-efficacy on the relationship between stretch goals and psychological entitlement. Specifically, psychological licensing theory states that individuals who engage in praiseworthy behavior are licensed to act unethically. Based on this, we propose that stretch goals may induce employces to generate psychological licenses because the extreme difficult and extreme novelty of stretch goals require employees to work creatively. Creative behavior is valuable and praiseworthy, and creative individuals are usually unique and tend to break the rules. This makes employee gain psychological license to act unethically. Psychological entitlement represents the psychological license, through which stretch goals induce employees′ unethical behavior. Furthermore, for employees with high creative self-efficacy, they are more willing to participate in the creative work required stretch goals, so that they can obtain higher psychological entitlement and then do more unethical behaviors. In conclusion, this study develops a moderated mediation model based on psychological licensing theory. We administrate a questionnaire survey with MBA students from two universities in northwestern China. Finally, we receive a total of 362 responses. We use Hayes′s PROCESS macro in SPSS to test the hypotheses. The results indicate that: (1) Stretch goals are positively related to employees′ unethical behavior. (2) Psychological entitlement mediates the relationship between stretch goals and unethical behavior. (3) Employees′ creative self-efficacy moderates the relationship between stretch goals and psychological entitlement, such that the relationship is stronger when employees′ creative self-efficacy is higher. (4) Employees′ creative self-efficacy moderates the indirect effect of stretch goals on unethical behavior through psychological entitlement, such that the indirect effect is stronger when employees′ creative self-efficacy is higher. In summary, this study contributes to the existing literature in several ways. First, this study reveals the “black box” of the relationship between stretch goals and unethical behavior by examining the mediating role of psychological entitlement drawing on psychological licensing theory. Furthermore, this study also extends the literature on stretch goals by examining the moderating role of creative self-efficacy on the relationship between stretch goals and psychological entitlement. In all, this study answers the question of how and when stretch goals may trigger unethical behavior. This study also suggests that practitioners should use stretch goals prudently, in particular pay attention to reduce the ethical cost.