Seeking Organizational Immortality: Legacy Biases in Organizational Decision-Making
研究个人在组织中的遗产动机（影响型与声誉型）如何通过声誉遗产安全感引发动机推理，导致决策偏向于创造或保护个人遗产，可能损害组织利益。
The work individuals do in organizations is an important vehicle for creating legacies—something perceived to outlive an individual that facilitates a sense of symbolic immortality. Current theory and research about legacies suggests that encouraging individuals to think about their personal legacy in a particular organization aligns the interests of the individual and the interests of future members of that organization, fostering decision-making that aligns with the interests of the collective. However, previous research has not fully considered how different types of legacy motives (impact vs. reputational) and the state of one’s reputational legacy in an organization might bias the way individuals evaluate different alternatives when making decisions. As a result, we do not fully understand how encouraging people to think about their personal legacy might affect their decision-making. In this paper, we argue that the extent to which an individual perceives they have achieved a state of reputational immortality in a particular organization—what we call reputational legacy security—can induce motivated reasoning as individuals evaluate various alternatives. This motivated reasoning can bias individuals to (a) pursue legacy creation or (b) protect secure legacies in ways that are potentially suboptimal for the organization in which they are embedded.