Are You Paying a Tip--or a Bribe?
Both are rewards for service, so why
is one considered outside the boundaries of ethical behavior?
Few
people see a relationship between tipping and bribing. But consider this: In
places where people tip heavily, bribes are more likely to exchange hands as
well.
New research shows that there's
actually a fine line between the socially acceptable act of tipping and the
immoral act of bribing, according to Magnus Thor Torfason, an assistant
professor in Harvard Business School's Entrepreneurial Management Unit.
His article for Social
Psychological & Personality Science, "Here's a Tip: Prosocial
Gratuities Are Linked to Corruption," was coauthored with Francis J.
Flynn, the Paul E. Holden Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford, and
Daniella Kupor, a doctoral student at Stanford.
"It is generally considered a
good-natured prosocial thing to tip, but bribing is considered to be antisocial
and negative," Torfason says. "So this relationship between tipping
and corruption is counterintuitive in the United States. But there is a fuzzy
line between the two."
Countries with higher rates of tipping behavior also tended
to have higher rates of corruption
The research might help executives
avoid falling into a trap where attitudes and beliefs about tipping lead to
bribing.
Torfason and his colleagues found a
link between these two behaviors when they studied cross-national data for 32
countries and controlled for per capita gross domestic product, income
inequality, and other factors. In short,
countries with higher rates of tipping behavior also tended to have higher
rates of corruption.
Tips and bribes can possess striking
similarities that may lead to their positive association, the researchers
report. "In a sense, both are gifts intended to strengthen social bonds
and each is offered in conjunction with advantageous service. One could even
argue that the main difference between the two acts is merely the timing of the
gift: Tips follow the rendering of a service, whereas bribes precede it."
Torfason says the link between
tipping and bribing may come in part from "temporal focus," or how
each individual thinks about and weighs the past and future. In some places,
tips are provided not so much to reward good service but to encourage good
service in the future—a perception that brings the tip closer to the purpose of
a bribe, which is also focused on future service.
A
history of mixed messages
The mixed messages that can come
with these cash exchanges have deep roots in history. During the Middle Ages,
feudal lords traveling beyond their territories would toss coins to beggars in
hopes that these acts of kindness would ensure safe trips. And in Tudor
England, guests who stayed overnight were expected to leave payment for their
hosts' servants at the end of their stay as a way of compensating for the extra
work their visit created.
Today, most people in Western
societies draw a distinct line between tipping and bribery, and the fact that
the two are linked runs counter to what most people would expect. When Torfason
and his colleagues asked 51 participants from a national online pool about their
impressions of the relationship between tipping and bribery, just 5.9 percent
said they thought they were "probably positively related," whereas
78.4 percent thought they were "probably not related."
"In the United States, people
assume tipping and bribery are not related," Torfason says. "There's
a clear distinction between professions that are tipped and situations where
informal payments would be considered a bribe."
And yet, despite this distinction,
corruption does exist in the United States, where consumers regularly tip
restaurant wait staff, taxi drivers, hairdressers and others, Torfason says.
"Richer countries tend to have
less corruption than poorer countries," he notes. "But if you control
for GDP in the US, our country is higher in tipping and also higher in
corruption than other similarly rich countries."
Examples
from Canada and India
In their research, the Torfason team
decided to take a particularly close look at Canada and India—which were
similar in their tipping habits, but quite different in their bribery
levels—with Canada seeing little bribing activity and India seeing
substantially more.
The researchers concluded that the
reason for this difference was rooted in the way people in the two countries
viewed this exchange of money.
Indians were more likely than
Canadians to tip with the hope that the offer would bring about better service
in the future. Canadians viewed tipping more as a reward for a service received
in the past. The researchers found that
Indians also rated bribery as more morally acceptable than did Canadians.
"Tips follow the
rendering of a service, whereas bribes precede it"
"In the mind of someone who
thinks of tipping as something that implies better future service, tipping and
bribery are closer together," Torfason says.
The researchers confirmed this
intuition in a lab experiment. They exposed 40 participants to articles about
tipping that differed in only one small aspect: whether tipping was framed as
being intended to either "reward good service" or "encourage
good service." Those exposed to the "encourage good service"
scenario viewed corruption less harshly. They felt that bribing a judge, for
instance, or paying foreign officials to facilitate business contracts was less
objectionable and immoral compared to the participants who were exposed to the
"reward good service" scenario.
Blurring
the lines
Extending the research results to
the business world, Torfason says that corporate
executives should be careful about the extent to which they engage in informal
exchanges both within and outside their organizations.
"Once you start engaging in
these informal tit-for-tat exchanges, it may increase your susceptibility to
engage in certain acts of informal exchange that may not be acceptable,"
explains Torfason.
It's important for companies to have clear rules about what
kinds of "favors" are acceptable when employees are interacting with
business associates outside the company.
And even within an organization, executives should avoid asking employees to
step beyond their job duties by doing favors that benefit the executives
personally.
"Executives can become quite
skilled at managing things through informal exchanges and favors. But that
means there is just a little step toward expecting their subordinates to do
favors or run personal errands for them, even though that's not what the
employees are getting paid to do," Torfason ssaysaid. "Executives
need to be careful not to use their positions to start expecting benefits that
go beyond their corporate role."
In general, he adds, people should
remain mindful of the association between tips and bribes so they can avoid
blurring the lines.
"Informal exchanges are
trickier to manage than people sometimes think," Torfason says. "Once
you are embedded in a web of informal transactions and favors, it can sometimes
become harder to judge what's appropriate and what's not."
Dina Gerdeman is a freelance writer based in Mansfield, Massachusetts.
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