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Employees may see technostress, that is, the stress experienced by individuals as a result of the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), as a threat to their jobs. In other words, employees may have a strong sense of job insecurity because of the ICT. This study aims to examine why and when employees might respond to technology-induced job insecurity (techno-insecurity) by engaging in workplace deviance – an activity that is costly for organizations.

The authors apply partial least squares structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses, using a sample of 354 valid responses.

The authors found that job-related technostress creators and technology-related technostress creators are positively associated with techno-insecurity. Techno-insecurity affects deviant behavior by increasing employees' moral disengagement. The authors also found that informal sanctions moderated the relationship between techno-insecurity and moral disengagement, while formal sanctions moderated the relationship between moral disengagement and deviance.

This study contributes to a better understanding of employee techno-insecurity and deviance by expanding the technostress literature and applying moral disengagement theory.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the complex relationships between permeability, work-family conflict, moral disengagement, behavioral disengagement, job strain and job engagement. In addition, this study aims to determine whether moral disengagement acts as a moderator and mediator in the relationship between work-family conflict and behavioral disengagement.

The authors apply partial least squares structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses, using a sample of 176 valid responses.

The results indicate that permeability is likely to promote work-family conflict, which in turn may trigger moral disengagement. Moral disengagement may lead to behavioral disengagement, which in turn may increase job strain and decrease job engagement. The findings also show that work-family conflict does not have a significant effect on behavioral disengagement, suggesting that moral disengagement fully mediates the influence of work-family conflict on behavioral disengagement. In addition, the moderating effect of moral disengagement is not significant.

Applying the transactional model of stress and coping theory and the moral disengagement theory, this study contributes to a better understanding of employees' experience of job strain caused by work-family conflict (induced by permeability of IM usage), as well as the employee's coping response.

Organizations are keenly interested to find out the causes of work disengagement that are harmful to achieve desired level of performance. Antecedents and levels of work disengagement vary across organizations and sectors due to differences in organizational culture. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to determine the antecedents of work disengagement in the public sector organizations.

The research data were obtained from 303 employees of the public sector organizations using the self-administered questionnaires and cluster sampling technique. The research model proposed in this study has been examined by using the regression analysis and Hayes’s (2013) guidelines for moderation.

It is found that work disengagement increases because of managers’ personal preferences, unfairness, above the rule practices, negative political influence, work overload, and a lack of accountability in the workplace. The results reveal a positive association among organizational injustice, organizational politics, work overload, and work disengagement. Moreover, it is also found that organizational injustice is a strongest predictor of work disengagement. Bureaucratic culture of the public sector organizations has a strong strengthening effect on above-stated relationships.

The study has identified various practical implications related to top management, employees, union, and researchers. The study provides new avenues for senior managers of the services sector to eradicate the levels of work disengagement by improving fairness and perception of organizational politics in the workplace.

There is rare literature that investigates the link between work disengagement and organizational injustice, organizational politics, and work overload especially in the presence of interactive effects of a bureaucratic culture. Most of the studies on employee disengagement did not use the unbiased and significant sample size so their results cannot be generalized to larger population. Therefore, the current study has aimed to overcome the shortcomings of previous studies and brings a novel conceptual model on work disengagement.

The purpose of this paper is using competing hypotheses (a spillover hypothesis, based on Engagement Theory, and a provisioning hypothesis, based on Adaptive Cost Theory) to help explain why employees become disengaged from knowledge sharing.

Employed knowledge workers completed an online questionnaire regarding their job characteristics, their general health and wellness, perceived organizational support, job engagement and disengagement from knowledge sharing.

The findings provide empirical support for Adaptive Cost Theory and illustrate the relationship between Engagement Theory and the Disengagement from Knowledge Sharing. In particular, this research illustrates the importance of health and wellness for preventing disengagement from knowledge sharing. In addition, the findings introduce a new finding of tensions between job engagement and knowledge sharing, which supports knowledge workers’ complaints of “being too busy” to share.

This study uses cross-sectional methodology; however, the participants are employed and in the field. Given the theoretical arguments that disengagement from knowledge sharing should be either short term or transient, future research should follow-up with diary methods to capture this to confirm the study’s conclusions.

The findings of this study provide some insight for practitioners on how to prevent disengagement from knowledge sharing. New predictors and an interesting tension between job engagement and knowledge sharing are identified.

This study examines an alternative explanation for the lack of knowledge sharing in organizations, and uses competing theories to identify the reasons for the disengagement from knowledge sharing.

This study aims to build a moderated mediation model to investigate the roles that trust in the leader and follower Machiavellianism can play in the relationship between moral disengagement of the leader and hiding of knowledge of the followers.

Data were gathered from eight universities in Turkey using a set of 72 matched leader (dean)–follower (faculty member) questionnaires. The hypotheses were tested with multiple regression, moderated regression and bootstrapping analyses.

The findings reveal that leader moral disengagement positively influences follower knowledge hiding, while trust in the leader mediates this influence and follower Machiavellianism not only moderates the relationship between leader moral disengagement and trust in the leader but also reduces the indirect relationship between leader moral disengagement and follower knowledge hiding through trust in the leader.

Even though measurements of research variables were collected from different sources and with time separation, common method bias might have existed. Also, this research is carried out in a single cultural context posing the issue of the generalizability of our findings to other cultural contexts.

The main contribution of this study is to construct and investigate a conceptual model that focuses on the possible effect of moral disengagement of the leader on knowledge hiding by the followers. Also, by supporting the mediating role of trust in the leader, this research reveals that followers of leaders with high moral disengagement are more prone to indulge in the hiding of knowledge. Moreover, the moderating role of follower Machiavellianism, found in this study, provides an additional understanding that followers may vary in the degree to which they are sensitive to the leader's influence.

The purpose of this study was to examine associations between fear of terrorism and several predictors (gender and nationality) and outcomes (moral disengagement, authoritarianism, aggression and social anxiety) in the USA and South Korean young adults. Of particular interest were the potential moderating and mediating roles of moral disengagement between fear of terrorism and the other outcomes.

Samples of 251 college students from the USA and 211 college students from South Korea completed survey packets including measures of fear of terrorism, moral disengagement, authoritarianism, aggression and social anxiety.

US participants expressed greater concern about a terrorist threat to their country, while South Koreans worried more about terrorist threats to their family or themselves. Females in both countries reported greater fear of terrorism and social anxiety. In both countries, fear of terrorism was associated with aggression, social anxiety and moral disengagement. Mediation analyses showed that fear of terrorism exerted a significant direct effect and an indirect effect via moral disengagement on aggression and authoritarianism in the US sample. Moderation analyses revealed that moral disengagement moderated the relationship between fear of terrorism and social anxiety in the Korean sample.

This study has the common limitations of cross-sectional studies; i.e. it cannot prove causal relationships.

The findings support Albert Bandura’s view that efforts to address the excesses of counterterrorism and other negative outcomes of fear of terrorism, attending to issues of moral disengagement may be helpful.

The authors findings provide support for the view that fear of terrorism is associated with negative psychological and social outcomes and that moral disengagement can play an important role in those negative outcomes. Moreover, it adds to evidence that the negative role of moral disengagement shows considerable generalizability across gender and two very different cultures.

Based on social cognitive theory, this study aims to explore the influence of supervisor bottom-line mentality (SBLM) on employee knowledge behavior (knowledge territorial behavior and knowledge sabotage behavior). The study first investigates the role of an ethical decision-making mechanism (moral disengagement) in mediating this relationship. In addition, it considers the possible boundary conditions to supplement research on the influence of SBLM in the knowledge management field.

The authors collected 256 data points from employees across three stages using convenience sampling. The authors then tested the proposed hypothesis using hierarchical regression and bootstrap methods.

The results demonstrated that SBLM promotes employees’ moral disengagement, leading to more knowledge territorial behavior and knowledge sabotage behavior. Furthermore, high power distance orientation among employees exacerbates the ill effects of SBLM according to the first stage of a moderated mediation model. Employees with such an orientation are more likely to respond to a SBLM by exhibiting a higher level of moral disengagement, thus increasing their knowledge territorial behavior and knowledge sabotage behavior.

Research on the influence of SBLM in the knowledge management field is limited. This study not only clarifies the relationships between SBLM and two types of knowledge behavior (knowledge territorial behavior and knowledge sabotage behavior) but also enriches the research on the antecedents of these two types of knowledge behavior.

Employee expediency is a ubiquitous, unethical phenomenon in the workplace that is largely underresearched. Based on the tenets of conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study investigates the influence of excessive performance pressure on employees' expedient behaviour via moral disengagement. It further examines the moderating role of employees' moral identity in the relationship between performance pressure and employee expediency.

The data were collected using a multi-wave paper-and-pencil survey amongst 388 sales associates working in pharmaceutical manufacturing companies in Bangladesh. A series of hierarchical regression analyses and bootstrapping techniques of the PROCESS macro were conducted to test the hypotheses.

The findings reveal that performance pressure significantly and positively affects employees' expediency. Additionally, moral disengagement partially mediates the positive relationship between performance pressure and employee expediency. Furthermore, moral identity moderates the direct effect of performance pressure on moral disengagement and the indirect effect of performance pressure on employee expediency through moral disengagement.

Managers are advised to consider the compatibility of economic and moral principles when defining performance targets or evaluating staff performance, as immoral behaviours harm organisations in the long run. Additionally, managers should emphasise candidates with high levels of sensitive moral qualities, such as integrity and moral behaviour, and their abilities should be given preference when hiring new employees, e.g. moral reasoning.

This pioneering study investigates the underlying psychological mechanisms and moral characteristics to unravel the association between performance pressure and employee expediency using the lens of COR theory. The study identified the moral consequences of performance pressure and mitigating strategies to reduce employee expedient behaviour.

Scholars have begun calling for broader conceptualisations of moral disengagement processes that reflect the interaction of dispositional and situational antecedents to a predilection to morally disengage. The authors argue that collective leadership may be one such contingent antecedent. While researching leaders from the Gilded Age of American business history, the authors encountered a compelling historical case that facilitates theory elaboration within these intersecting domains. Interpreting evidence from the embittered leader dyad of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, the authors show how leader egoism can permeate moral identity to promote symbolic moral self-regard and moral licensing, which augment a propensity to morally disengage. The authors use insights developed from our analysis to illustrate a process conceptualisation that reflects a dispositional and situational interaction as a precursor to moral disengagement and explains how collective leadership can function as a moral disengagement trigger/tool to reduce cognitive dissonance and support the cognitive, behavioural, and rhetorical processes utilised to justify unethical behaviour.

This study aims to investigate the influential factors driving customer-oriented constructive deviance (COCD) within the context of the tourism and hospitality industry. Specifically, the authors explore the role of moral emotions as mediators and moral disengagement as a moderator.

In Study 1, the participant pool consisted of 259 frontline service employees hailing from a diverse selection of 54 four- and five-star hotels. Study 2 took an alternative approach, using a scenario-based experiment with 212 participants.

The results reported that organizational injustice toward customers is positively related to other-condemning emotions and leads to COCD. The results also reported that perceived customer citizenship behavior (CCB) positively relates to other-praising emotions, resulting in constructive deviance from customer-oriented. Moreover, these findings support moral emotions and moral disengagement interactions.

This paper shows that an organization’s injustice of external parties, such as customers, may provide important information that employees use to shape their moral emotions (e.g. other condemning emotions) and behavior toward the organization (e.g. COCD). Furthermore, this study confirms that perceived customer citizenship behavior contributes to COCD through other-praising emotions.