Vegetable Gardens and Rationalizing

I recently spoke with a friend who used to pick vegetables at a vegetable garden when he was younger. At the vegetable garden, workers were paid by the pound for some types of vegetables and by the bucket for other types. He told me that many people would “accidentally” add a few rocks to their buckets for the vegetables that were paid by the pound. He also said that workers would stack the vegetables in the bottom of the bucket in a log cabin style so as to use up as much space with the fewest amount of vegetables for the vegetables that were paid by the bucket. My friend is an honest person, and if he did participate in this behavior in the past, I doubt he would do so now. The story got me thinking about fraud in the business world and some of the similarities we see in this type of rationalization.

Monitoring Matters

In a surprising development (to no one familiar with auditing or internal controls), it turns out that monitoring can actually make a difference in the way people behave!

Actually, a field study focused on monitoring and described in the NYT provides some interesting insights. While it isn't really surprising that monitoring focused on deterring theft actually deterred theft, what is less expected is that anti-theft monitoring actually increased productive efforts by employees. From the NYT article: