Abstract
Greed is one of the most common features of human nature, and it has recently attracted increasing research interest. The aims of this paper are to provide one of the first empirical investigations of the effects of greed on job performance and to explore the mediating role of the need for social status and perceived distributive justice. Using a working sample (N = 315) from China, the current study found that greed promoted both task and contextual performance through the intermediary effect of the need for social status. At the same time, greed inhibited both types of performance through perceived distributive justice. These results confirmed our hypothesis that greed is a double-edged sword with opposite effects on one’s performance. The findings suggest that organizations should both address greedy employees’ social status concerns and ensure that they are treated fairly so that organizations can fully utilize the talents of greedy people and channel their energy in a beneficial direction.
Highlights
The discussion on greed is as old as the discussion on wealth and power
As expected, greed was positively correlated with need for social status (r = 0.30, p < 0.01) and negatively correlated with perception of distributive justice (r = −0.16, p < 0.01)
Both need for social status and perception of distributive justice were positively correlated with task performance and contextual performance
Summary
A consensus has been reached that greed is a common and inevitable part of human nature (Balot, 2001; Wang et al, 2011), people seem to hold different attitudes toward greed. Studies have suggested that greed is associated with many negative characteristics (Gilliland and Anderson, 2011). It makes people focus only on their personal fulfillment and satisfaction, ignoring norms and values (Levine, 2005), and this focus may explain why greed is associated with such negative behaviors as fraud (Smith, 2003), deception (Cohen et al, 2009), theft (Caudill, 1988), corruption (Rose-Ackerman, 1999), and other unethical behaviors (Seuntjens et al, 2019)
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