Employees at socially-conscious companies are more likely to lie

Quartz, January 04, 2018

A strong ethos of corporate social responsibility can be good for a company’s bottom line. Employees who believe in their company’s environmental and social values are more loyal, more satisfied, and in some cases more productive than those uninspired by their employer’s moral standards.

Corporate social responsibility measures make employees feel good about themselves—so good, in fact, that they may be willing to let their personal ethics slide at the company’s expense.

In a recent paper , economists John A. List and Fatemeh Momeni, both at the University of Chicago, found that working for a socially responsible company may unconsciously motivate employees to act more irresponsibly themselves. The study is a working paper published by National Bureau of Economics Research, which means it hasn’t yet been reviewed by other academics.