According to a study published in the Harvard Business Review called “Pushing Employee’s to go the Extra Mile can be Counterproductive”  suggests that moral licensing through pushing employees to far can cause counterproductive behaviour in an organization. The research team conducted two studies, one in China where they surveyed a range of organizations who were persuading their employees to go above and beyond their requirements and one in the US where they surveyed organizations that were externally motivating their employees to go the extra mile.

The study in China revealed that initially pushing employees to go beyond their requirements lead to behaviour of ‘good citizenship’. However, in the long run it led to irregular behaviour where workers were making fun of their team workers or co workers and taking office equipment without permission. The study in the US showed that the effect of pushing employees the extra mile led to deviant behaviour inside and outside work such as cursing at a stranger or at a co worker.

The researchers believe the theory of ‘moral licensing’ can explain these rather counterintuitive outcomes in behaviour. The theory suggests that doing something good gives us a license to do bad things later. It’s like having a bank account where good acts build up credit that can be used when a bad act in committed to convince that we balanced the equation and we are still good people. In both studies observations of employees who were motivated by extrinsic factors led them to develop a phycological entitlement by going the extra mile. This entitlement acts like the moral license to engage in deviant behavior,  basically “Compliance leads to Deviance”.

The researchers believe to avoid the negative effects of moral licensing is to create an organizational environment that values and pushes for intrinsic behavior of good citizenship. In my opinion I think intrinsic motivation is more effective at motivating your employees because  if people want to do work instead of have to it will lead to trust being formed within the organization and would yield more productivity. I also believe that majority of leaders understand it but the reason why extrinsic factors are appealing are because of the short term gain in productivity and its implementation is much easier. Organizations who have been sustainable over the long run are those who have built trust amongst their employees and motivating people to work through intrinsic motivation. This build employee loyalty and leads to the person wanting to work because they want to not because they have to increasing productivity.

Article Link: – https://hbr.org/2016/09/pushing-employees-to-go-the-extra-mile-can-be-counterproductive

Picture comes from the article.