Social Comparisons and Deception Across Workplace Hierarchies: Field and Experimental Evidence

We examine how unfavorable social comparisons differentially spur employees of varying hierarchical levels to engage in deception. Drawing on literatures in social psychology and workplace self-esteem, we theorize that negative comparisons cause senior employees to seek to improve reported relative performance measures via deception. In a first study, we use deceptive self-downloads on SSRN, the leading working paper repository in the social sciences, to show that employees higher in a hierarchy are more likely to engage in deception, particularly when the employee has enjoyed a high level of past success. In a second study, we confirm this finding in two scenario-based experiments. Our results suggest that longer-tenured and more successful employees face a greater loss of self-esteem from negative social comparisons, and are more likely engage in deception in response to reported performance that is lower than that of peers. * We thank Michael Jensen, Gregg Gordon and Ralph D’Andrea for providing the SSRN data and for their help and feedback. We also thank Susan Taylor (the Editor) and anonymous referees, Max Bazerman, Francesca Gino, Kathleen McGinn, Lamar Pierce, Maurice Schweitzer, and numerous seminar participants for their feedback. All errors are our own.