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Systemic Incongruity: Bringing Down The Risks Of Conformity And Deviation Biases, Shefali V. Patil

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

Employees often have to decide whether to conform to or deviate from the status quo. Exhibiting consistent preferences for either preserving or maintaining the status quo (i.e., conformity biases) or for challenging or rejecting the status quo (i.e., deviation biases) can be costly. Conformity biases prevent employees from adapting to changing task demands and deviation biases hamper the predictability and reliability of decisions. It is therefore important for scholars and practitioners to understand how to engineer work environments that, to the degree possible, enable employees to bring down both types of risks. However, our understanding of this issue is limited …