What Do You Recommend? The Effects of Communication and Dark Personality on Misreporting in Autonomous Teams

In autonomous teams, formal responsibility for tasks and decisions is shared among different team members, creating uncertainty about how much influence each team member effectively has . We use a modified participative budgeting game to ex-amine how team members of autonomous teams deal with this uncertainty in the context of cost reporting decisions. Our results show that team misreporting be-comes more pronounced the darker the team members’ personality and that communication within the team fulfills a crucial role. We find that communication does not discipline dishonest team members with a darker personality but, instead, assists them in infecting honest team members with a less dark personality. We further show that this dishonesty shift among honest team members occurs because they revise their social norm perceptions. These findings are consistent with predictions based on social norm theory and the Dark Triad literature