Is Management Theory Too “Self-ish”? Robert Folger* Department of Management, College of Business Administration, University of Central Florida, 4000 Central Florida Blvd., Orlando, FL 32816-1400 Rommel (Bombie) Salvador Milgard School of Business, University of Washington,Tacoma, 1900 Commerce St., Tacoma, WA 98402-3100 Within the realm of management and the other social sciences, many scholars have used self- interest explanations to account for individual judgment, decision making, and behavior with respect to a variety of issues in the domains of ethics and justice. In this article, the authors address the descriptive claim that all human behavior can ultimately be traced to underlying self-interest. Reviewing arguments from the philosophical literatures and evidence from man- agement, social psychology, and behavioral economics, the authors argue that exclusively rely- ing on self-interest explanations is a bad scientific strategy that discourages researchers from considering other determinants of how people behave. Keywords: self-interest; psychological egoism; ethics; moral judgment Consider the following two ways of thinking about corporate scandals such as those sur- rounding Enron and the like. Examples of greed gone wild, suggests one line of thought, reveal a temptation to pursue self-interest that lurks inside us all: Given a chance to benefit at someone else’s expense, people will take advantage of that opportunity if they think they will get away with it. Thus, it would seem as if preventing corrupt business practices will have to rely on sanctioning by rewards and punishment, along with strict enforcement mecha- nisms. Academics in management will simply have to teach the proper mechanisms of 1127 *Corresponding author: Tel.: 407-823-1722; fax: 407-823-3725 E-mail address: rfolger@bus.ucf.edu Journal of Management, Vol. 34 No. 6, December 2008 1127-1151 DOI: 10.1177/0149206308324321 © 2008 Southern Management Association. All rights reserved.