Ranking the Stars in Employee Giving Programs: When Does Donation Engagement Spill Over to Subsequent Ethics?

Abstract

We experimentally examine whether ranking employees on a social dimension can help
employees to learn something about their self-concept and can foster better ethical decisions
afterwards. We examine this question in the context of popular employee-giving programs,
whereby proponents argue that such employee engagement can spill over into better ethical
decision-making. We predict and find that disclosing relative performance information (RPI) about
employees’ charitable contributions can activate such a spillover on ethical decision making, but
only when employees donate their money but not their time. We attribute our findings to the fact
that unlike time, money is more difficult to adjust for other competing motives, which makes RPI
more informative for learning where a person stands in terms of ethics. A series of additional
experiments offer further support to our theory that RPI, when informative, can foster learning
about where one stands in terms of ethics. Ranking employees on a social dimension can thus
improve subsequent ethical decision making, but the way how companies organize their employeegiving programs is crucial to activate such a spillover.

Keywords: Employee giving, learning, ethics, relative performance information

JEL Classification: D83, M40