| Popis: |
Unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) harms individuals, undermines organizational longevity, and corrodes the fabric of society. However, we still know little about what causes it. The present research identifies a seemingly counterintuitive driver of UPB—job embeddedness. Although embeddedness consistently predicts positive individual and organizational outcomes, embedded employees are highly identified with their organization, committed to its goals, and, we argue, willing to further their organization’s cause “by any means necessary”—including through unethical behavior. Drawing on theories of social identity and ethical climate, we propose a model for why and when embeddedness motivates UPB. Embeddedness causes UPB by increasing individuals’ motivation to comply with their organization’s norms, but only when they perceive this organization’s normative climate to be unethical. We provide support for this model across multiple samples and methods. Among a sample of approximately 16,000 former violent extremists, we first find embeddedness to predict their support for using violence to achieve their organization’s objectives. We then report preregistered experiments among American employees establishing that embeddedness causes greater UPB and that this effect is mediated by their increased motivation to comply with organizational norms. However, this only occurs when the organization’s climate is perceived to be unethical—individuals embedded in an ethical organization show less willingness to engage in UPB. This work advances job embeddedness theory and may inform practical efforts to harness the benefits of high embeddedness while curtailing its costs. |
