強い監視による看過の増幅 : コミットメント・エスカレーションに役員が与える影響, The Escalation of Commitment Follows Monitoring: Dysfunctional Effects of Increasing Outside Directors on the Recognition of Bad Loans

人間は他者の持つ自身に対するポジティブなイメージを守ろうとするため，監視や評価をされている状況では，撤退を選ばない傾向にあるとエスカレーション研究は指摘してきた．本研究はその知見を応用し，外部から来た取締役が多いほど，評価や監視が厳しいため，経営者は計画通りに進捗していない案件から撤退しなくなる可能性を議論する．その上で，撤退の事例として銀行の不良債権処理を用い，この可能性を定量的に検討する．, This research employs the escalation theory and demonstrates that increasing management accountability and monitoring by outside directors leads to the commitment escalation. Our argument is that the number of outside directors, which we usually assume increase the quality of corporate governance, has negative relationship with investment escalation. We discuss outside directors will increase the complexity inherent in the acknowledgment of fault by management in earlier decisions, or in the explanation as to why management failed to withdraw and cut losses and they will be vulnerable to replacement. Therefore increasing management accountability or monitoring by outside directors are predicted to cause self-justification effect and self-presentation effect to the currently losing projects and to increase the possibility that management is likely to endeavor to preserve a losing proposition because withdrawal implies responsibility for a sequence of losses and previous decisions. Following Staw, Barsade, and Koput (1997) that is one of the pioneering literatures in escalation studies, we use medium-sized Japanese banks as a sample and demonstrate this hypothesis. Our analysis shows that the escalation factors are evident in firms that there are a large number of outside directors, which implies traditional governance prescription to prevent managers’ self-interest behavior rather worsen them.