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

We experimentally examine whether ranking employees on a social dimension can help them 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. Ranking employees on a social dimension can thus lead to better subsequent ethical decision making, but the way how companies organize their employee-giving programs is crucial to activate such a spillover