In this article, we draw on the writings of Nigerian-born sociologist Peter P. Ekeh and, using extensive and hard-to-reach fieldwork data, we seek to understand how members of the Civic Public—the political and business elite—managed to obscure and obfuscate their corruption via accounting tools and strategies at the expense of the communities they serve, i.e., the Primordial Public. We find that members of the Civic Public engaged in a series of accounting schemes—some simple, others complex—to divert vast sums of much-needed funds away from the intended beneficiaries of a major charitable initiative established to provide aid for the un(der)-employed youth of Ghana. We make important contributions to the study of accounting, corruption, and morality. First, we disaggregate amorality from morality, situating these terms both theoretically and contextually, before discussing how members of the primordial public are systemically and culturally socialized to the elite's amorality. We build on and extend Ekeh's arguments in two ways. First, we discuss the emergence of a third public, which we call the “In-between”. Second, we argue that members of this third public are increasingly at risk of being dragged into morally dubious actions by and on behalf of their elite peers as they are persuaded toward morally dubious actions and behaviours.

This study investigates, via two experiments, the effects of target transparency, which reflects employees' knowledge about each other's targets in an organization, on managers' target setting decisions. We also investigate whether this effect depends on the need for help among employees. We predict and find that target transparency and need for help interact to influence managers' target setting decisions. Target transparency increases target levels when the need for help is low, but not when it is high. Further, target transparency leads managers to differentiate less between individual employee targets. This reduction is greater when the need for help is high than when it is low. Additional analyses support our theory by revealing that managers strategically set targets in a way that is consistent with an intention to motivate both effort at the individual level and help among employees when such are needed. Our results help explain anecdotal evidence of why companies that value help among employees often make targets transparent throughout the entire organization.

Prior accounting and economics research suggests that tournaments with highly concentrated prizes attract the most talented individuals. However, this research assumes that tournament entrants have granular, reliable information about their relative skill level. Using a laboratory experiment, we replicate this result: when relative skill information is available, prize concentration leads to skill-based selection. However, when relative skill information is unavailable, and tournament choice is public, we find that highly concentrated prizes instead attract more narcissistic individuals. Together, our results suggest that high-level positions with exceptionally large prizes can attract narcissistic applicants when entry decisions are publicly observable and relative skill information is limited. These findings inform both theory and practice by clarifying when tournament prize concentration selects for skill versus personality.

While multinational firms invest large amounts of money in employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) to reduce turnover, there is little evidence regarding ESOPs' effectiveness in retaining rank-and-file employees and none on a global scale. Building on psychological ownership (PO) arguments, we predict that a rank-and-file employee's ESOP participation will be negatively associated with a firm exit decision and that this effect will be stronger in contextual settings that are more conducive to turnover. For our analysis, we used internal data from a large multinational firm covering 190,453 rank-and-file employees and approximately 650,000 employee years. We find that ESOP participation is associated with a lower likelihood of individual firm exit decisions. We also find this effect to be more pronounced in countries with favorable labor market conditions and lower uncertainty avoidance (UA). Additional tests support our argument that PO arising from ESOP participation is particularly important for rank-and-file employees, who often only invest small amounts. Overall, our study provides cross-country evidence regarding the retention effect of ESOP participation for rank-and-file employees.