정당화 의무가 자원 할당 결정에 미치는 영향

초록

The allocation of resource is a pervasive human activity. We must all allocate our budget for necessities, food, and leisure activities and allocate those budgets again within each category. The same goes for marketing managers. With firms spending sizable amount of money on marketing activities, marketing managers bear the responsibility to optimally allocate these resources and demonstrate that these investments generate appropriate returns for the firm. Allocating marketing resources, however, is no simple decision. The emergence of new marketing tools such as social networking and word of mouth marketing is making the decision even more complicated. It is not easy to isolate the effect of a marketing tool in this dynamic business environment. Although there are many decision aids developed to help allocating marketing resources, still much are left to manager’s subjective judgment. Allocation of marketing resources is a difficult managerial decision because, in most cases, it will require making decisions that will displease identifiable parties. This is especially true if a manager tries to remove funds from under-performing programs and to add funds to successful programs in an attempt to increase the overall return on marketing investments. Giving some-to-all, although it would hobble every programs’ capacity to achieve objectives, allows a manager to avoid the interpersonally and politically difficult situation of giving less-to-some. For this reason, managers tend to unduly prefer an even split of resources to an uneven split. Organizations often hold decision makers accountable for important decisions in the hope that the social pressure of having to justify their decision will improve decision-making, productivity, and outcome. Indeed many people expect that simply requiring someone to explain their decisions to others will promote more careful thought processes and better decision outcomes. One might suppose, therefore, that accountability for their allocation decision will encourage managers to make a difficult decision of giving less-to-some. However, findings to date suggest that only highly specialized subtypes of accountability lead to better decision outcomes and that people often cope with accountability by simply seeking out the most expedient and obviously acceptable position. There are reasons to believe, therefore, that accountability for their allocation decision might just backfire and encourage managers to further avoid making a difficult decision of giving less-to-some. The present studies used real resource allocations to examine the effects of recipient accountability on resource allocation decision. In the studies, participants evaluated two other participants’ responses on a creativity test and made a binary choice regarding how to reward the other participants’ performance. The choice set included: (a) awarding 5000 Won to both participants or (b) awarding 8000 Won to the participant who performed better and awarding 4000 Won to the other. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to an accountability condition, wherein they were informed ahead of making a choice that they would need to justify the basis for their choice to the recipients of the allocations. Results revealed that recipient accountability encouraged participants to avoid making difficult decision of giving less-to-some. Whereas participants in the control (unaccountable) condition were more likely to choose option b (the uneven division), accountable participants were much more likely to choose option a (even division). The reasons provided by participants for their allocation decision revealed that such difference was associated with different perceptions of fairness. Whereas participants in the control condition were more likely to think that it is only fair to reward participants based on the excellence of their performance, accountable participants were more likely to think that it is only fair to reward participants based on time and effort they put into their performance. Interestingly, contrary to the observed effect, lay intuition predicted that their own decision will be immune to such influence from recipient accountability. Our findings hold more import because of the fact that lay intuition failed to predict the effect of recipient accountability. To sum up, the present studies found that making decision makers accountable to recipients of allocation made them prefer even split of resource even further than they otherwise would. This is quite an opposite of what people would expect when they impose accountability to resource allocators. Taken together, the present findings provide useful insight into such problems as how to structure accountability relationships in firms to help marketing managers make sound resource allocation decision. Because the studies involved real money and real behavior, it provides not only theoretical insights for researchers but also practical implication for marketing managers.

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