Fudging the Numbers

If you want to encourage your people to cheat
Set them a goal, a challenging feat.
Make them report on their progress to you,
And watch them distort by a number or two.

Now goals are quite useful as management tools

But if you impose them, you're acting the fool
Goals from within drive hard work and persistence
But goals from above demand nagging insistence

Also, from goals, do some problems arise

As the worker reports and, in ways, justifies.
He tries to do well, but when late or overdue
The ethics will suffer, and reports won't be true.

Research by Schweitzer, Ordonez and Douma
Suggests that goal setting causes us gloom. A
problem occurs when the task isn't complete,
unethical behaviour emerges, they cheat.

Especially when people are close, but not quite
Their target eludes them, try as they might
The closer they get, the more likely they are
To toss out their ethics, and report that they're stars.

What does the research suggest that we do,
To set goals but not bid our ethics adieu?
A prescription, it seems, that can be quite effective
Is to ask, please, that reports just not be defective.

For more information, read "Goal Setting as a Motivator of Unethical Behaviour", by Maurice Schweitzer, Lisa Ordonez and Bambi Douma, Academy of Management Journal 2004.

For even more information, read A Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance by Locke and Latham.