Now You Do It, Now You Don’t: The Mixed Blessing of Creative Deviance as a Prosocial Behavior

Abstract

Creative deviance, the act of developing an idea by an employee even when it was banned by the manager, is a novel and interesting construct that can bring both positive and negative outcomes to organizations. The construct of creative deviance is neglected in the existing literature and the theory development for creative deviance is still in the nascent stages. We expand the theoretical nomological network of creative deviance by introducing prosocial motivation as an antecedent of creative deviance and developing a multilevel model of the moderators of this relationship. Creative deviance can occur due to pro-self or prosocial intentions. In our paper, we focus on the prosocial intentions behind acts of creative deviance. We illustrate how the prosocial motivation can lead to creative deviance and how creative deviance in turn, can act as a double-edged sword leading to positive outcomes of creative performance and innovation as well as negative outcomes of wastage of resources and deteriorated leader member exchange. Our model delineates the boundary conditions influencing the relationship between creative deviance and its outcomes. Specifically, we explore the theoretical foundations of social skills and perspective taking, as the individual level moderators; team network structure and climate of excellence, as moderators at team level; organizational structure at organization level; and uncertainty as the external environmental level moderator.

“Lubricant” or “Stumbling Block”?: The Paradoxical Association Between Team Authoritarian Leadership and Creative Deviance

“…However, we do not assert that creative deviance is a panacea for all innovative woes. It is argued that there may be several circumstances where creative deviance causes penalties, e.g., wastage of resources and deteriorated leader member exchange ( Shukla and Kark, 2020 ). Meanwhile, many researchers have also pointed out that the practice of creative deviance simultaneously includes positive and negative components, so it is essential to explore whether it benefits R&D teams.…”

“…Second, although there is a growing interest in the creative deviance domain, researches concentrating on the leadership-level antecedents are still under-developed ( Lin et al, 2016 ). Creative deviance has been widely proved to occur under a range of preconditions, e.g., task autonomy ( Masoudnia and Szwejczewski, 2012 ), information acquisition ( Galperin, 2012 ), human resource management practices ( Malik and Lenka, 2019 ), Machiavellianism ( Galperin, 2012 ), prosocial motivation ( Vadera et al, 2013 ; Shukla and Kark, 2020 ), psychological capital ( Gao et al, 2020 ), and personal overqualification ( Dar and Rahman, 2020 ). However, there is still a dearth of explorations relating to team leadership.…”

“…There is a definite need to investigate the psychologically relevant moderators (i.e., the psychologically boundary conditions regarding when team authoritarian leadership is more or less influential to creative deviance). Researchers have emphasized that creative deviance is a disobedient, well-intentioned, pioneering construct ( Criscuolo et al, 2014 ) that is affected by external environment ( Dahling and Gutworth, 2017 ; Shukla and Kark, 2020 ) and mental characteristics ( Ng and Yam, 2019 ; Dar and Rahman, 2020 ). Therefore, conscious judgments from individual mindfulness ( Nübold et al, 2019 ) could influence the occurrence of creative deviance as well as its relationship with authoritarian leadership.…”

Fostering Constructive Deviance by Leader Moral Humility: The Mediating Role of Employee Moral Identity and Moderating Role of Normative Conflict

“…Research has suggested that constructive deviance is pro-social in nature and is recognized as an ethical decision (Galperin, 2012;Jetten & Hornsey, 2014;Vardaman et al, 2014). However, due to the violation of rules, constructive deviance has a negative impact on interpersonal outcomes (Shukla & Kark, 2020). Accordingly, constructive deviance involves both moral relevance and risk-taking.…”

How Does Social Currency Influence Prosocial Behavior? The Role of Collective Self-Esteem and Communication Network Heterogeneity

“…By and large, previous research has examined the factors and mechanisms that influence PB, including internal motivation (Christner et al, 2020;Gherghel et al, 2020;Shukla and Kark, 2020), community forces (Vives and FeldmanHall, 2018), and social support (DuBois et al, 2002). However, previous research has overlooked the critical role of social currency in converting individual motivation to social behavior.…”