Search results

This study aims to investigate the effects of both internal and external corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) on organizational workplace deviant behaviours (OWDB) by using social cognitive theory. The study also explores the role of moral disengagement as a mediator in this relationship.

Data was collected from a sample of 321 individuals employed in the textile industry of Pakistan. The study used partial least square-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to estimate the relationships within the model.

The findings indicate that both internal and external CSI have a positive impact on moral disengagement. Secondly, moral disengagement drives OWDB positively. Thirdly, moral disengagement is a significant mediator that mediates between both internal and external CSI and OWDB positively.

This research offers novel perspectives to organizational leaders, highlighting the significance of addressing CSI in conjunction with sustainability endeavours. It is imperative for business managers to prioritize the morality of their employees.

This study’s novelty lies in its confirmation of the mediating role of moral disengagement in the relationship between internal and external CSI and OWDB.

Research has demonstrated that ethical leadership helps to limit subordinates' workplace deviance. In this chapter, we draw on social cognitive theory of moral thought and action to further understand why ethical leadership has a preventing impact on workplace deviance. We propose that the key mechanism between ethical leadership and deviance is moral disengagement, which refers to the process of making unethical behavior morally or socially acceptable. Specifically, subordinates learn cognitively and emotionally from ethical leaders to minimize the adoption of moral disengagement. When they decrease the use of moral disengagement, subordinates are less likely to display deviant behavior.

Some of the best information for preventing accounting violations is received from employees who have observed the unethical behavior (Henning, 2016). However, receiving information about accounting violations or other unethical behavior in organizations requires employees to voluntarily report the behavior. Employees may be particularly hesitant to report unethical behavior when the behavior benefits them. Employees may also justify their own unethical behavior as morally appropriate when their moral identity allows the behavior. The authors draw on psychology and ethics literature to examine the relationships among moral identity, moral disengagement, and unethical behavior. In the exploration of behavior, the authors examine both commissions and omissions. While unethical commissions are violations directly committed by an individual without cooperation from others, unethical omissions are violations resulting from an individual failing to take steps necessary to correct another's unethical behavior.

The authors conduct a survey about cheating with a sample of college students. Using structural equation modeling, the authors find that intentions to engage in unethical commissions are positively associated with moral disengagement, while unethical omissions do not appear to create the moral disengagement that can arise from cognitive dissonance. The authors also find a feedback loop from moral disengagement to future intentions, which suggests moral disengagement created from one unethical act increases intentions for future unethical behavior. Finally, the authors find a simple intervention that can help to increase the moral intensity of observed unethical behavior.

This chapter explores the nature of disengagement and the role played by emotions while disentangling the overlapping theories and definitions of both engagement and disengagement. We carried out two related studies exploring engagement and disengagement in 10 large UK public and private sector organisations. Both studies used an interpretive approach involving 75 managers and employees. The chapter suggests that emotions play a mediating role in the process of disengagement and the emotional reaction involved provides a distinction to being ‘not engaged’. It highlights the confusion that different approaches bring to distinguishing engagement and disengagement from other job attitudes.

This study aims to assess the direct impact of workplace hazing and the indirect impact via moral disengagement on organizational deviance behavior and negative word-of-mouth (WOM) communication in the hospitality industry of Pakistan. This research also addresses the significance of psychological (resilience) and social factors (friendship prevalence) as moderators of the relationship between workplace hazing and moral disengagement.

Using a multirespondent strategy, the data was collected from 319 newcomers employed in the Pakistani hospitality industry and analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The results reveal that workplace hazing increases moral disengagement, organizational deviance and negative WOM communication. Moreover, various psychological factors can significantly decrease and mediate the negative influence of workplace hazing on moral disengagement.

The managers should explicitly and formally handle the workplace hazing issues like harassment and bullying to build a positive working environment for newcomers.

This study addresses a gap in determining the significance of workplace hazing and its impact on moral disengagement, organizational deviance and negative WOM communication. Also, this study contributes to the literature by examining either social or psychological factors that play an important role in dampening the negative impact of workplace hazing.

Status demotion in hierarchical loyalty programs (HLPs) has received considerable academic attention. However, existing research is relatively silent on whether HLP status demotion fosters service relationship fading by influencing demoted customers’ psychological disengagement and the likelihood of patronage reduction. Drawing on the relationship fading literature and the stimulus–organism–response framework, this study aims to examine these effects. It further investigates the moderating role of psychological ownership on the links of status demotion with psychological disengagement and the likelihood of patronage reduction.

Two studies (Studies 1 and 2) were conducted in the context of airline HLPs. Study 1 was a structured survey conducted among 213 demoted airline HLP customers in Australia, and Study 2 was an experiment conducted among 178 executive MBA students in Bangladesh. The PROCESS macro was used to test the moderated mediation model.

The results of both studies show that HLP status demotion significantly influences customers’ psychological disengagement and the likelihood of patronage reduction. The findings also reveal that psychological disengagement mediates the relationship between status demotion and the likelihood of patronage reduction. Further, customers with high (low) psychological ownership feel high (less) psychological disengagement and show high (less) likelihood of patronage reduction due to their HLP status demotion.

This study extends the existing literature on relationship marketing and HLPs by offering a better understanding of how and under what conditions status demotion elicits customers’ psychological disengagement and the likelihood of patronage reduction.

The article challenges the narrow view in scholarship which presents disengagement as passive and simply the absence of condition of engagement and explores how food retail employees articulate their disengagement within the intensified customer-centric service work. The article adopts the term “active disengagement”, as presented by Ackroyd and Thompson (2016) and empirically examines this as a form of oppositional voice towards managerial norms and behavioural expectations.

The article draws on qualitative data from two case study organisations in the Cypriot food retail sector. Forty-six interviews took place with participants across different departments, including front-line employees and front-line and senior managers, to better understand the research problem through different perspectives.

The data show that disengagement is an integral part of organisational life and it is expressed in an individual and less-risky way. The data also reveal a variation in disengagement actions across departments, depending on employees' mobility on the shop floor and the intensity of interaction with the customers and the line manager. Shop floor employees enjoyed a wider “space of disengagement”, in comparison to those working on the front-end/checkouts. Nevertheless, checkout employees have developed sophisticated actions to express disengagement.

This research provides a refined understanding of active disengagement in organisations. It empirically contributes to the existence of a spectrum of engagement and expands Ackroyd and Thompson's (2016) “active disengagement” framework, discussing it as a form of oppositional voice towards corporate values and the customer-centric work intensification.

The research provides empirical evidence that employee disengagement is not merely the absence of engagement, as HRM scholars and practitioners have argued, but entails further social meanings. This article will be useful for practitioners to rethink, revisit and revise employee engagement programmes in organisations, as well as to re-write corporate values, mission and vision, to also consider employees' experiences within the workplace. This will allow the provision of social support by management to address active disengagement in service organisations.

The study provides an important insight in employees' individual actions to express disengagement towards corporate values and managerial expectations related to customer service. It highlights the variation of dynamics across the food retail shop floor, which has been treated as a contextual periphery within the disengagement debate. Applying a broader lens on retail work heterogeneity, it provides further understanding of the diversity of how frontline service workers express disengagement within the triadic employment relationship. This study offers ground for future research to examine active disengagement in various contexts for better conceptual and practical understanding of this behaviour in organisations.

Guided by the job demands-resources model, this study aims to investigate the underlying mediation mechanisms through which vertical relationship conflict between employees and their supervisors and horizontal relationship conflict between employees and their colleagues escalate into work disengagement. It proposes exhaustion and workplace social isolation as the mediators and explores the relative importance of vertical and horizontal relationship conflicts in influencing work disengagement through the distinct impacts of the mediators.

Data collected from a three-wave study of 181 online-questionnaire respondents are used to test the research model using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

Vertical relationship conflict has an indirect effect on work disengagement via exhaustion, whereas horizontal relationship conflict has an indirect effect on work disengagement via workplace social isolation. Compared with horizontal relationship conflict, vertical relationship conflict exerts a stronger effect on work disengagement.

This study addresses a void in the literature on relationship conflict by investigating work disengagement from the perspective of both vertical and horizontal relationship conflict as well as from the perspective of both strain- and resource-centric mediators (i.e. exhaustion and workplace social isolation, respectively), providing a comparatively detailed analysis.

The purpose of this study was to explicate how leaders’ knowledge hiding results in employees’ knowledge hiding. In addition, the study was intended to explore under what conditions leaders’ knowledge hiding affects employees’ moral disengagement more deleteriously.

Data were collected from 321 employees at three different times which were two months apart from each other. Structural equation modeling was used for data analysis.

The study found leaders’ knowledge hiding to be related to employee moral disengagement. In addition, the study found moral disengagement to affect employees’ knowledge-hiding behavior. Moral disengagement was found to mediate the relationship between leaders’ knowledge hiding and employees’ knowledge hiding. Finally, the study found that employees with high moral identity show more perseverance to preserve their moral engagement when led by knowledge-hiding leaders.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study was first to establish a relationship between a leader’s knowledge hiding and employees’ moral disengagement. The study also established the mediating role of moral disengagement to work as a mediating mechanism linking leaders’ knowledge hiding to employees’ knowledge hiding. Finally, the study found that moral identity moderates the relationship between leaders’ knowledge hiding and employees’ moral disengagement.

This study aims to understand how abusive supervision influences employees’ unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB). In particular, the mediating effect of moral disengagement and moderating role of traditionality on this relationship were examined.

This study conducted a two-wave questionnaire survey using data collected from 629 employees from different companies in China. Moderated mediation analysis was conducted to test the hypotheses.

The results show that moral disengagement mediates the relationship between abusive supervision and employees’ UPB. Employee traditionality enhances the relationship between abusive supervision and moral disengagement as well as the indirect effect of abusive supervision on employees’ UPB via moral disengagement.

First, by exploring the positive impact of abusive supervision on UPB, the authors enhance the current understanding of the role of negative leadership in the development of UPB and enrich the research on the antecedents of UPB and outcomes of abusive supervision. Second, based on social cognitive theory, this study enriches the literature on abusive supervision and employee UPB by identifying moral disengagement as a mediator. Third, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the authors are among the first to incorporate traditionality to tell a Chinese story about how traditional employees respond to the effects of abusive supervision on UPB, providing a new lens for the cultural boundary condition in the occurrence mechanism of UPB.