Winning at all costs: An exploration of bottom‐line mentality, Machiavellianism, and organisational citizenship behaviour

Abstract

This study seeks to advance the bottom‐line mentality literature by exploring an antecedent and outcome of employee bottom‐line mentality. We build and test a moderated‐mediation model by arguing that the personality trait of Machiavellianism promotes an employee's adoption of a bottom‐line mentality. Moreover, drawing on trait activation theory, we argue that this relationship is fully activated when the employee perceives that the organisation endorses a bottom‐line mentality. To expand our theoretical model, we also suggest that employee bottom‐line mentality inhibits organisational citizenship behaviour directed towards co‐workers. Lastly, we investigate whether an employee's perception of an organisation's bottom‐line mentality conditionally moderates the indirect effect of Machiavellianism on organisational citizenship behaviour directed towards co‐workers through the mediated mechanism of employee bottom‐line mentality. Our theoretical model is tested across two distinct studies. Study 1, a field study conducted within a variety of organisations, provides evidence for our initial predictions (Hypotheses 1 and 2). Study 2, a multisource field study conducted in multiple industries, replicates and extends the findings from Study 1 by providing evidence for the entire moderated‐mediation model. We find support for our hypothesised model across both studies. Implications for theory and practice are discussed, and suggestions for future research are identified.

Thriving at work but insomniac at home: Understanding the relationship between supervisor bottom-line mentality and employee functioning

“…To date, prior research has primarily explored the effects of supervisor BLM in the work domain and mostly from a dysfunctional perspective (e.g. Eissa et al, 2019;Greenbaum et al, 2012;Mawritz et al, 2017;Quade et al, 2020; see colleagues (2019b, 2020) for exceptions). This line of inquiry has shown that supervisor BLM facilitates abusive supervision (Mawritz et al, 2017), lowers employee performance (Quade et al, 2020), increases employee turnover intention (Mesdaghinia et al, 2019), and triggers social undermining behavior (Greenbaum et al, 2012).…”

The mixed blessing of supervisor bottom-line mentality: examining the moderating role of gender

“…If the employee shares personal work knowledge with colleagues, her/his competitive advantage will be weakened (Eissa et al, 2018). Subordinates with BLMs are likely to win at all costs (Eissa et al, 2019), let alone withhold or conceal knowledge such as how to more effectively get jobs done to avoid losing the competitive advantage. Thus, we hypothesize as follows:…”

“…By so doing, our study advances the BLM literature by bringing in a gender lens. Researchers have previously examined various boundary conditions, e.g., employee conscientiousness (Greenbaum et al, 2012), Machiavellianism (Eissa et al, 2019), moral identity (Mesdaghinia et al, 2019), employee core self-evaluations, and employee ambition (Babalola et al, 2020) of BLM and relevant outcomes. However, few BLM studies have explored the moderating role of gender.…”

Self-Regulation Failure? The Influence Mechanism of Leader Reward Omission on Employee Deviant Behavior

“…In such cases, moral disengagement is more likely to occur. Moreover, Machiavellians, who do not lack moral standards (Schepers, 2003), tend to ignore moral norms or engage in moral disengagement (Dahling et al, 2008;Gabi et al, 2019). Therefore, we suggest that subordinates with high-level Machiavellians are more inclined to respond to an abuser in an unethical way in the face of the lack of reward.…”