The Dark Side of Competition for Status

What is it about?

Unethical behavior within organizations is not rare. We investigate experimentally the role of status-seeking behavior in sabotage and cheating activities aiming at improving one’s performance ranking in a flat-wage environment.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Some individuals do not hesitate to incur a cost to improve their rank by sabotaging others’ work or by increasing artificially their own performance. Introducing sabotage opportunities has a strong detrimental effect on performance. Therefore, ranking incentives should be used with care.