Management Accounting Section Midyear Meeting

Behavioral Contagion and Gender Differences: The Effect of Reflection

• In Event: Break and Research Exhibition 2
  In Paper Session: Room 1

Abstract

In hierarchical organizations, we know little about how past manager-employee experiences affect employees' behavior towards their future subordinates when they are being promoted to the next level. We predict that contagion takes place (i.e., employees mimic their former manager’s behavior when being promoted) such that the effect of experiencing a trusting manager relative to a less trusting manager affects future behavior of the promoted employee when they take up the role of manager. We also predict that when the promoted employee reflects on the behavior of his or her previous manager, the contagion will be mitigated. In a 2 × 1 experiment with two consecutive trust games, participants in the role of the employee (trustee) in the first game are promoted to manager (trustor) in the second game. We manipulate whether or not employees have to reflect on their manager’s behavior in between the two games. In general, we find evidence of contagion in that promoted employees who experienced a manager that trusted them (less) in the past are behaving more (less) trusting towards their own subordinate. Yet, reflection does not seem to mitigate contagion as we anticipated. Instead, we find that the effect of reflection on contagion depends on gender. While contagion is present for males without reflection, it becomes weaker with reflection (through reflection males start to trust less regardless of experiencing a trusting vs. distrusting manager in the past). For females, however, we find the opposite effect. Without reflection, they trust less regardless of how their manager behaved in the past, while in the reflection condition, they start to exhibit contagion whereby they also trust more when experiencing a trusting manager.

Authors

• Eddy Cardinaels, Tilburg University

• Katlijn Haesebrouck, Maastricht University

• Nela Rakic Milosevic, KU Leuven