But, the phenomenon is distinct from wealth-maximizing behavior, since it persists both when incentives are removed and when they are changed to create an opportunity cost for maximizing the surrogate.
[2] In a follow-up study, Choi, Hecht, and Tayler demonstrate involving managers in the selection of a strategy reduces their tendency to surrogate.
He also finds that the effect is larger for people who have a high preference for consistency, which supports the argument that surrogation is due to an attempt to reduce cognitive dissonance.
In a related study, Black, Meservy, Tayler, Williams, and Brock Kirwan (neuroscientist) use fMRI technology to investigate how surrogation happens at a neurocognitive level.
Operational managers perceive that dashboards focused on specifically tailored KPIs lead to both improved managerial and organizational performance.
Surrogation is conceptually related to Plato's Allegory of the Cave in that people are failing to distinguish the shadow (i.e. the measure) from the form (i.e. the construct).
[7] In a fall 2019 article, Tayler and doctoral student Michael Harris discussed how surrogation at Wells Fargo led management to inadvertently replace their "build long-term relationships" strategy with their "cross-selling" metric, resulting in a massive account fraud scandal.
[9] In his book entitled When More is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic Efficiency, Roger L. Martin explains the pervasiveness of surrogation through examples in business, public policy, and other areas of every-day life.
Martin suggests that "business executives need to turn their backs on the dominant vector of reductionism, recognize that slack is not the enemy, guard against surrogation by using multiple measures, and appreciate that monopolization is not a sustainable goal".