Abstract
Managers make decisions every day. Often the decisions are about meeting sales goals, production goals, earnings goals, delivery goals, scheduling goals, and a broad range of strategic and operational goals. Managerial commitment to reaching important organizational goals is, obviously, considered a good thing. Most of the time it is. But, is it possible to be over-committed to accomplishing an organizational goal? In short, the answer seems to be "yes." While teleopathy is defined here as, literally, "goal sickness," it is conceptually defined as goal striving that becomes so strong it prevents, or drives out, or otherwise precludes appropriate moral awareness or consideration of ethical issues. Thus, it is a dysfunction in decision making wherein one's drive to reach a goal takes full attention at the expense of ethical or moral awareness and related considerations. In this paper we identify and elaborate on the concept of teleopathy and we summarize how previous research has addressed goals and unethical behavior. This includes the possible negative influence of goals through decreasing of moral awareness, depleting of self-regulatory resources, increasing risktaking behaviors, and the attainment of social approval associated with worthy end goals. We extend existing literature by identifying and elaborating on the relationships of the theoretical perspectives in self-efficacy research that have theoretical importance for predicting and explaining teleopathic goal seeking behavior. Furthermore, we integrate recent research finding in the motivated reasoning literature to offer up possible theoretical explanations for persistence. How can managers who are engaged in teleopathic behaviors persist along the same path in the face of new, additional information being presented to them that suggests, or even outright states, that concern should be given to the ethical implications of their current decisions? Recent research into motivated reasoning helps shed light on the matter. So, in this paper, self-efficacy research is used to derive and add theoretical linkages and propositions about what can be antecedents of teleopathic goal striving. Similarly, motivated reasoning research is drawn upon to theorize about the persistence of teleopathic decision striving. Practical implications for individuals and organizations are discussed as well as tactics for reducing the frequency or likelihood of the problematic teleopathic goal striving behaviors.