Why greed is wrong

His wife was fed-up with his self-centred pursuits. His grown-up children were not happy with him either, as he had never paid much attention to them. Sid admitted that chasing deals was the only thing that made him feel alive. He always felt the urge to earn more money. When I asked Sid why money was so central to his life, he told me that he grew up watching his entrepreneurial father go through several bankruptcies.

He remembered how embarrassed he was when his family would hide to avoid creditors. I told Sid that he should be pleased with his accomplishments. He was now independently wealthy and could do whatever he wanted. Early negative experiences with parents appear to set the stage for feelings of low self-esteem. Many greedy people obsessively pursue wealth as a substitute for what they feel is lacking inside them.

But they ignore the high price that comes with greediness — a stunted life. Materialistic pursuits are often an attempt at relieving emotional discomfort. In fact, the behaviour of greedy people can be compared to that of substance abusers. But just like drugs, material possessions can never provide the comfort and reassurance we all crave. On the contrary, the greedier we become, the more we advance on the path of self-destruction. Ironically, greed is not so much of a financial issue.

It is the symptom of a troubled mind trying to link self-worth to financial worth, usually on a subconscious level. Far too often, greed comes with stress, exhaustion, anxiety, depression and despair. In addition, it can lead to maladaptive behaviour patterns such as gambling, hoarding, trickery and even theft. Some believe that without a dose of greed, a given person, community or society may lack the motivation to move forward.

In sum, greed spurs accomplishments. It could even be a means to transcend death, since our possessions persist after we pass on. True enough, many successful societies are driven by greed. It has been argued that political systems designed to eliminate greedy behaviour have invariably led to poverty, chaos and other disastrous results. I believe that, as with most things in life, managing greed is about balance. Trial Try full digital access and see why over 1 million readers subscribe to the FT.

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All participants completed the survey online. Debriefing information was also provided online at the end of the survey. Participants were recruited from a paid research participation system 1 , which is used by millions of users in China. Four items in the survey were used as attention checks. The first item was presented soon after the participants provided their consent to participate.

The participants were asked whether they were going to answer the questions in the survey seriously. Another three attention check items were positioned randomly in the survey. These three items were used to detect participants who failed to read items carefully and chose their responses blindly. Participants who failed any one of the items were regarded as unqualified.

The criterion for participant screening was entered into the research participation system beforehand. Only those who passed the attention checks remained in the dataset. Three hundred and fifteen participants comprised the final sample. All participants had jobs and came from various regions in China. Specifically, The sample consisted of males Each participant received 8 Chinese Yuan for their participation. All research data from this study are available at Mendeley Data.

Greed was measured by the Chinese version Liu et al. All items e. Liu et al. The need for social status was measured by the eight-item scale developed by Flynn et al. In the current study, the scale was translated into Chinese strictly following the back-translation method Brislin, Perceived distributive justice was measured by the Chinese version Wang, of the five-item scale originally developed by Niehoff and Moorman Wang demonstrated that the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the scale are satisfactory.

In the current study, the Cronbach alpha of the scale was 0. Employee performance was measured by the Chinese version Wang and Liao, of a item scale originally developed by Van Dyne and LePine The scale includes two dimensions, namely, task performance four-items; e. Wang and Liao demonstrated that the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the scale are satisfactory. Before testing the hypothesized model, we examined the measurement models first. All variables were modeled as latent factors with their item means as indicators of the latent constructs.

Items with loadings less than 0. Specifically, the latent factor greed was modeled with the seven items as indicators; the latent factor need for social status was modeled with the eight items as indicators; the latent factor perceived distributive justice was modeled with the five items as indicators; the latent factor task performance was modeled with the four items as indicators; and the latent factor contextual performance was modeled with the items as indicators.

We next checked whether common method variance existed following Podsakoff et al. Finally, we examined the hypothesized model using latent variable path analyses with structural equation modeling SEM.

The mediating role of perceived distributive justice and need for social status was tested using the bootstrap option bootstrap samples. Table 1 presents the means, standard deviations, and correlations among variables. Table 1. First, we tested every measurement model of the study variables.

The factor loadings of all items measuring study variables ranged between 0. To ensure that common method variance was not a problem, we tested an alternative model with all factors collapsed into one latent factor Podsakoff et al.

Hence, our hypothesized measurement model showed a better fit to the data. We finally tested a hypothesized structural model controlling the effects of demographic variables on task performance and contextual performance. Figure 1. Results of the empirical model test. The results support both Hypotheses 1a and 1b. The results support both Hypotheses 2a and 2b.

Greed has attracted increasing research interest in recent years. Specifically, greed could motivate individuals to work hard but also could diminish their desire to demonstrate good performance. In addition, we found that greed promoted performance through the intermediary effect of the need for social status but simultaneously inhibited performance through perceived distributive justice. The pattern of the relationship generally held for both task and contextual performance.

The findings of the current study provide some empirical evidence that the greedier an individual is, the stronger his or her need for social status, and the higher his or her level of performance. These results are also consistent with previous research findings that greedy individuals are more productivity-oriented and have a stronger desire to win Krekels and Pandelaere, Although some researchers have claimed that greed is socially harmful Krekels et al.

In other words, the dissatisfaction experienced by greedy people casts doubt on the distributive justice of organizations. Although the effect size is small, the findings of the current study provide some empirical evidence that the greedier an individual is, the lower his or her perceived distributive justice and the poorer his or her level of performance. The results of the current study contribute to the literature on equity sensitivity Huseman et al.

Differing attitudes toward greed remain in the literature. Although some researchers have argued the dual effects of greed, they often have developed their propositions from an interpersonal perspective, i. This idea is consistent with Hume claim that greed, on the one hand, encourages people to do better and, on the other hand, has devastating consequences for society. The current study extends the double-edged nature of greed to the intrapersonal domain.

We found that even for greedy people themselves, greed could simultaneously facilitate and impede their performance. These findings are important contributions to the field because they suggest that greed is not necessarily good or bad. Its valence depends on what is motivating greedy people. If the desire for social status is stimulated, greedy people could contribute to organizations by improving not only their task performance but also their contextual performance.

However, if greedy people are haunted by the perceived distributive injustice of an organization, their performance might be negatively affected. For organizations, the conditions under which greed could generate beneficial outcomes is a more meaningful question than whether greed is good or bad or should be encouraged or curbed. First, given that the current study employed a cross-sectional design, further longitudinal study is needed before any causal relationships can be established.

For example, the current study proposed that greed is a determinant of the need for social status. However, it is also possible that the need for social status might make people greedy. A cross-lagged panel design would help researchers to confirm the causality relations in our model.

However, following Podsakoff et al. Meanwhile, researchers have found that self-rated performance is highly positively related to peer-rated performance Demerouti et al. Third, future studies could explore the boundary condition of this two-pathway model. The current study found that both mediators existed between greed and job performance, and it is reasonable to speculate that some key contextual factors may influence which path plays a more important role. For instance, Knight and Mehta found a joint effect of social status and hierarchy stability on performance.

Specifically, higher status individuals performed better than lower status individuals when hierarchy stability was high. This finding suggests that the effect of the need for social status may exist only when hierarchy stability is low, under which circumstance people with low status have more access to higher status.

Finally, the generalizability of the current results could be examined in different cultures. The cultural context of the current study, China, emphasizes social status much more than many other countries Xi, Although the desire for status is fundamental and universal Anderson et al.

Huberman et al. They found that Chinese people pay more attention to social status and show more status-seeking behaviors than people from the other countries Huberman et al. In addition, traditional Chinese values encourage people to improve their social status through their efforts and to pursue their wealth and status in moral ways Xi, Future studies in different cultures are necessary to provide supporting evidence for the dual effect model of greed.

The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author. This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the American Psychological Association Ethics Guidelines and the Committee on Human Protection and Ethics in Psychology.

All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. YZ developed the study concept, and performed the data analysis and interpretation. YZ and XS created the study design and drafted the manuscript. SL performed the testing and data collection. GX provided the revisions.

All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.