ORIGINAL PAPER The Unwitting Accomplice: How Organizations Enable Motivated Reasoning and Self-Serving Behavior Laura J. Noval 1 • Morela Hernandez 2 Received: 28 July 2016 / Accepted: 11 September 2017 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017 Abstract In this article, we demonstrate that individuals use motivated reasoning to convince themselves that their self-serving behavior is justified, which in turn affects the distribution of resources in business situations. Specifi- cally, we explore how ambiguous contextual cues and individual beliefs can jointly form motivated reasoning. Across two experimental studies, we find that whereas individual ideologies that endorse status hierarchies (i.e., social dominance orientation) can strengthen the relation- ship between contextual ambiguity and motivated reason- ing, individual beliefs rooted in fairness and equality (i.e., moral identity) can weaken it. Our findings contribute to person–situation theories of business ethics and provide evidence that two ubiquitous factors in business organiza- tions—contextual ambiguity and social dominance orien- tation—give rise to motivated reasoning, enabling decision makers to engage in self-serving distributions of resources. Keywords Behavioral business ethics Á Moral identity Á Motivated reasoning Á Resource allocation Á Self-serving behavior Á Situational strength Á Social dominance orientation Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. (Mercier & Sperber, 2011) High-stake decisions in business involve some type of resource allocation. Even though decision makers strive to comply with fairness expectations when distributing resources (Allison and Messick 1990; Messick 1993; Rutte et al. 1987), there are myriad exceptions. Indeed, examples of employees taking more than their fair share are ubiquitous in modern organizational contexts. Some of the most notorious—such as the 2012 trader nicknamed the ‘‘London whale’’ who was responsible for a $2 billion loss—come from the housing bubble that arose during a period of market flux and high-risk, opaque hedging strategies. Perpetrators of these actions often claim that they were entitled to these resources (Rosenblatt 2012), and experimental research confirms that decision makers who take more resources for themselves at the expense of others believe that they have earned the right to do so (e.g., De Cremer and van Dijk 2005; Hoffman and Spitzer 1985; Samuelson and Allison 1994). We propose that feeling entitled to a larger share of a resource might come not from objective assessments of reality, but rather from motivated reasoning, which occurs when people ‘‘selectively notice, encode, and retain information that is consistent with their desires’’ (Grant and Berry 2011, p. 73). In the last decade of research in behavioral business ethics, scholars have moved away from a ‘‘bad apples’’ approach in which only people with poor moral charac- teristics are likely to behave unethically, to approaches that consider how people can engage in self-serving behaviors while convinced of the rightness and fairness of doing so (Moore and Gino 2015; Shalvi et al. 2015; Trevin ˜o et al. 2006). As the opening quote suggests, people can use their & Laura J. Noval l.noval@imperial.ac.uk Morela Hernandez HernandezM@darden.virginia.edu 1 Imperial College Business School, Imperial College of London, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, UK 2 Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, 100 Darden Boulevard, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA 123 J Bus Ethics DOI 10.1007/s10551-017-3698-9