When it Pays to be Dissatisfied: Modeling Employees’ Motives to Game Engagement Surveys

In this paper we integrate disparate literatures and theoretical traditions to examine various motives employees may have to intentionally distort their responses on organizational engagement surveys. We contribute (a) a reexamination of the implicit assumption underlying the extensive use of engagement surveys in organizations: that employees’ ratings provide an “unfiltered” (Macey et al., 2009) and veridical representation of their true levels of satisfaction and engagement and, consequently, that the resulting scores are unquestionably useful and actionable; (b) a theoretical exposition of how intentional distortion in engagement surveys comes about as a result of the interplay between the activation of one or more requisite gain/loss frames and the motivational components of counterfactuals, instrumentality and valence; and (c) the identification of theoretically relevant distal determinants of intentional distortion, operating at the organizational, item, respondent, and relational levels. We conclud...