Greed in Organizational Context: A Literature Review and Prospects

Duan Jinyun, Yin Yishuai, Song Dian

Foreign Economics & Management Vol. 44, Issue 06, pp. 34 - 46 (2022)  DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20220310.201

Summary

Greed refers to excessive desire without satisfaction. It is a widespread personality trait, which plays an important role in economy, management, politics, life and other fields. However, the current research on greed is relatively scattered, especially in the context of organizational management. In order to make up for this important gap in the previous literature, this paper systematically combs and critically summarizes the researches on greed in the context of organizational management. This paper firstly introduces the concept and measurement of greed, and points out the advantages and disadvantages of different concepts and measurements. On this basis, this paper analyzes the causes of greed, including the factors at the individual level, the situation level and the interaction between the individual and the situation level, and summarizes the impact of greed, including emotion, decision-making and behavior. It is worth pointing out that greed is a double-edged sword. It has both positive effects, such as enhancing competitiveness and driving organizational development, and negative consequences, such as excessive risk-taking decisions and unethical behaviors. Finally, this paper constructs an integrated framework of greed research, and proposes that future research can be carried out from the following aspects: (1) Further develop the connotation and measurement tools of greed in the organizational context. (2) Explore the impact of different degrees of greed on employees’ job performance and satisfaction and managers’ leadership. (3) Explore the immaterial greed in the organization, such as the impact of knowledge greed on knowledge hiding behavior and the impact of time greed on creativity. (4) Deeply study the interaction between organizational context and individual greed, such as how network culture affects the greedy decisions of employees and leaders in the digital context. (5) Explore the relationship between greed and organizational structure, organizational culture and other organizational research topics. (6) Focus on the cross-cultural research of greed. This paper attempts to make the following contributions: First, it systematically sorts out the concept of greed and the relationship between cause and effect, proposes an integrated research framework, and provides a new research topic and direction for the future study of greed. Second, based on the comprehensive analysis of relevant literature, it focuses on the manifestation and mechanism of greed in the context of organizational management, deepening and expanding the research on greed in the context of organizational management. Third, it has some enlightenment on how organizations and their managers deal with greed effectively in practice. In this paper, the influencing factors of greed are summarized as environment and individual and their interaction factors, which is helpful to comprehensively analyze the mechanism of greed in organizations and provide reference directions and ideas for organizations and individuals to effectively deal with greed. In addition, this paper has reference significance for organizations to reverse the negative effects of greed and make full use of its positive effects.

Keywords

greed in organizational context; influencing factors; deviance behavior; organizational performance; cross-cultural study