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An employee engagement/disengagement typology is presented to visually illustrate their possible constructive and destructive effects within the workplace, and identify some of the contextual drivers that may lead to these occurrences.

A narrative literature review was conducted during 2020–2023 to gain a comprehensive overview of employee engagement and disengagement processes and theories since 1990. Content analysis enabled the findings to be grouped into their destructive and constructive behavioural effects to produce a new typology.

The typology shows that not all employee engagement is constructive and that not all disengagement is destructive. This more accurately reflects organisational life. Destructive employee engagement in particular, demonstrates that there can be “too-much-of-a-good-thing”.

The typology may help inform future research designs to further understand the impact of contextual factors on both constructs, the pluralist interests involved and which interventions are likely to encourage constructive engagement and disengagement within specific contexts.

It is recommended that employee engagement and disengagement are incorporated into leadership and management training and that practices to foster constructive employee engagement (or permit temporary constructive disengagement to allow recovery) endorse the principles of mutuality and reciprocity. Interventions to prevent destructive employee engagement and disengagement are also advisable, particularly when there are adverse internal and external contextual issues which risk disengagement.

The typology is the first to classify engaged and disengaged behaviours within the workplace across two dimensions. In doing so, this helps to evaluate employee engagement and disengagement theory by challenging the normative assumptions held within these constructs. This categorisation more accurately represents both constructs and visually illustrates that within the workplace, not only is employee engagement sometimes destructive but also that sometimes disengagement is constructive. Furthermore, it demonstrates that purposive destructive employee disengagement responses may be passive or active.

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.

The pervasive issue of employee exploitation has surfaced as a salient ethical quandary within the context of modern-day workplaces, thereby demanding expeditious and imperative deliberation and redressal. This research endeavor aims to meticulously investigate the ramifications of employee exploitation on the proclivity to partake in the act of cutting corners within the workplace. This analysis encompasses the sequential mediating variables of negative emotions, namely resentment, anger, and frustration, as well as moral disengagement.

A purposive sampling technique and self-administered questionnaires were utilized in this study of 132 SME sector personnel. The current study is time-lagged in nature and uses the Amos software, the data were analyzed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, as well as structural equation modeling.

According to the results, employee exploitation has a strong positive impact on cutting corners. This effect is mediated progressively by negative emotions (resentment, anguish, frustration), as well as moral disengagement. According to the findings, organizations should prioritize addressing employee exploitation to build a healthy work environment that promotes employee well-being and encourages employee voice.

This study’s novelty comes from its analysis of the sequential mediation of negative emotions, as well as moral disengagement, in the relationship between employee exploitation and cutting corners. The study’s findings add to the body of literature concerning management development, conflict handling, and employees’ attitudes and behaviors by offering a thorough grasp of the detrimental effects of employee exploitation on cutting corners as well as useful recommendations for businesses looking to promote productive workplaces.

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.

The multitude of high-profile corporate scandals has prompted the need for more nuanced understanding of factors within organizations that may influence unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB). Based on the social cognitive theory, this study aims to examine the impact of supervisor bottom-line mentality (BLM) on unethical, but pro-organizational conduct by employees through moral disengagement. Additionally, this study examines the moderating role of employee mindfulness in relation of supervisor BLM and moral disengagement.

To test the study model, the authors collected data from 198 employees working in various Pakistani firms. This study uses PROCESS procedures for the analysis.

Analyses of time-lagged data showed that (1) supervisor BLM can lead to employee UPB through employee moral disengagement and (2) mindfulness moderated this relationship, such that high (versus low) mindfulness attenuates the link between supervisor BLM and moral disengagement.

This study adds to the extant research by examining how and when supervisor BLM leads to employee UPB. This is the first attempt to examine how supervisor BLM and trait mindfulness jointly determine moral disengagement, which drives UPB.

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.

This research seeks to examine the mitigating effect of religiosity on the relationship between abusive supervision and unethical behavior in employees, with moral disengagement serving as a mediating factor. Drawing on social cognitive theory, the study proposes an overarching moderated mediation framework to analyze this complex dynamic.

The testing of the model was based on hierarchical data obtained from 70 work units in services sector. Within this framework, 70 supervisors evaluated the unethical conduct of employees, while 700 employees assessed the abusive supervision they experienced and reported on their own moral disengagement and religiosity. For the analysis of both the measurement and the hypothesized models, multilevel modeling techniques in the Mplus software were utilized.

The study's findings indicate a direct positive link between abusive supervision and employees' unethical behavior, with moral disengagement mediating this relationship. Furthermore, the research discovered that abusive supervision leads to unethical behavior in employees through moral disengagement only in instances where their religiosity is low.

This research delves deeper by elucidating the role of moral disengagement in the dynamic between abusive supervision and unethical behavior. Diverging from prior research, this study uniquely highlights the moderating role of religiosity, showing its potential to weaken the impact of abusive supervision on unethical behavior in employees through moral disengagement.

The purpose of this study is to understand how ethical leadership and coworker ethical behavior will influence employee unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB). In particular, the authors examine the mediating effect of moral disengagement on the relationship between ethical leadership and UPB and also investigate the moderating effect of coworker ethical behavior on the aforementioned effect.

Data were collected from 251 employee–coworker dyads from five organizations in Taiwan at two time points. Moderated mediation analysis was conducted to test the hypotheses.

The results show that moral disengagement mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and employee UPB. Moreover, the results show that coworker ethical behavior moderates the relationship between moral disengagement and employee UPB, as well as the mediated relationship between ethical leadership and employee UPB via moral disengagement. Specifically, both the moral disengagement–UPB relationship and the ethical leadership–moral disengagement–UPB relationship become weaker when coworker ethical behavior is high.

The results highlight the importance of creating an ethical work environment to get everyone behaving ethically in the workplace, because nurturing an ethical atmosphere in organizations will be useful in reducing the occurrence of UPB even for those who have high levels of moral disengagement.

This study shows that coworkers matter morally as much as leaders, demonstrating the importance of social influence from coworkers in organizations.

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.