The Contagion of Unethical Pro-organizational Behavior: From Leaders to Followers

Abstract

Unethical pro-organizational behavior is a common phenomenon in businesses, and one that can cause great damage to them as well as to wider society. Although prior studies have investigated why individuals engage in unethical pro-organizational behavior, little research has been undertaken into why such behavior might be commonplace in organizations. The present study focuses on the downstream contagion of unethical pro-organizational behavior from leaders to followers. Drawing on social identity theory, we consider why leaders’ unethical pro-organizational behavior brings about corresponding behavior in their employees. Moreover, we predict that leader identification and moral identity will moderate this relationship. Using a time-lag study design, we collected a sample of 227 multisource time-lagged data with which to test our hypotheses. The results show that there is a significant positive relationship between leaders’ and employees’ unethical pro-organizational behavior, and that this relationship is stronger when employees have higher leader identification and lower moral identity levels. The theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed in this paper, as are the limitations of the study.

Unethical Pro-organizational Behavior: A Moderated Mediational Model of Its Transmission From Managers to Employees

“…The present study builds on this emergent literature and also responds to the call for exploring the mechanisms underlying the relationship between supervisor UPB and employee UPB (Zhang et al, 2018). The cognitive and psychological processes that underlie and influence the cause and effect relations of workplace behaviors are intrinsically important relative to theory development (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000;Moore et al, 2012;Moore & Gino, 2015;Tenbrunsel & Smith-Crowe, 2008;Treviño et al, 2006).…”

“…Such antecedents include employee attitudes such as organizational affective commitment (Matherne & Litchfield, 2012), organizational identification (Effelsberg et al, 2014;Umphress et al, 2010), and psychological entitlement (Lee et al, 2019); leader behaviors such as ethical leadership (Miao et al, 2013;Wang & Li, 2019), transformational leadership (Effelsberg et al, 2014;Graham et al, 2015), and responsible leadership (Cheng et al, 2019); and organizational characteristics such as ethical organizational climate (Miao et al, 2013). Additionally, Fehr et al (2019) and Zhang et al (2018) demonstrated that supervisor UPB is positively associated with subordinate UPB.…”

Research on the Relationship Between High-Commitment Work Systems and Employees’ Unethical Pro-organizational Behavior: The Moderating Role of Balanced Reciprocity Beliefs

“…Previous studies have studied the antecedents of unethical pro-organizational behavior from the perspectives of individual characteristics (such as psychological rights, moral identity, moral disengagement, the high performance expectation, and the high performance pressure; Wu et al, 2016a ; Chen and Liang, 2017 ; Zhao and Zhou, 2017 ; Lee et al, 2019 ), leadership style and behavior (such as transformational leadership, and moral leadership; Miao et al, 2013 ; Effelsberg et al, 2014 ; Zhang et al, 2018 ; Wang and Li, 2019 ), and colleague behavior ( Thau et al, 2015 ). However, it is worth noting that employees often engage in unethical pro-organizational behavior for the sake of organization’s short-term interests.…”

Does Benevolent Leadership Promote Follower Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior? A Social Identity Perspective

“…Thus, moral identity is an important concept of moral cognition that stimulates ethical behavior (Aquino et al, 2009), and if followers have different levels of moral identity, their behaviors might also differ. Y. Zhang et al (2018) demonstrated that moral identity could weaken the effects of a leader’s UPB on a follower’s UPB.…”

“…Y. Zhang et al (2018) demonstrated that moral identity could weaken the effects of a leader's UPB on a follower's UPB. From the analysis above, we infer that followers with high moral identity under benevolent leadership will engage in less UPB, and we propose the following hypothesis:…”