Management Accounting Section Midyear Meeting

The Effect of Recognition Visibility and Employee Narcissism on Employee Advice-Seeking Behavior

• In Event: Helping and Advice Seeking

Abstract

Prior literature suggests employees often benefit from seeking advice to reduce task uncertainty and improve performance. In this paper, we investigate how the visibility of an employee recognition program (private versus public) interacts with the level of employee narcissism (higher versus lower) to influence employee advice-seeking behavior. We find that, compared to more narcissistic employees, less narcissistic employees increase their advice-seeking frequency under a public recognition program compared to a private recognition program. Specifically, we find that less narcissistic employees seek advice from their manager more frequently in the public recognition condition than in the private recognition condition. We also find that more narcissistic employees (relative to less narcissistic employees) are more likely to view advice-seeking as a means of increasing their visibility to the manager. As such, recognition visibility does not influence more narcissistic employees’ advice-seeking behavior. In supplemental analyses, we find that under private recognition more narcissistic employees will seek advice more frequently than less narcissistic employees do, and this effect is mediated through their belief that seeking advice will make them more visible to the manager. Overall, our finding contributes to employee recognition literature and provides guidance on the design of managerial control systems.

Authors

• Ta Tung Stephanie Cheng, University of Wyoming

• Mac Festa, University of Wyoming

• Eric N. Johnson, University of Wyoming

• Patrick Witz, University of Wyoming

• Suyun (Sue) Wu, The University of Texas at El Paso