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Despite its prevalence and serious negative impact on consumer behavior, marketing strategies and social welfare, little is known about how to effectively curb moral licensing. Drawing on research in warm-glow giving and virtue signaling, this paper aims to propose that social sharing can help alleviate the moral licensing effect; and this effect is mediated by moral self-regard and moderated by temporal distance.

Two experimental studies were conducted in a laboratory setting using large samples. In particular, Study 1 was designed to test the proposed main and mediation effects, and Study 2 was designed to further examine the proposed moderation effect.

Study 1 demonstrates after having shared a prior moral behavior on social media, people are more likely to engage in another moral act subsequently. This is because that sharing a prior moral behavior on social media leads to a drop in moral self-regard, which, in turn, boosts a subsequent moral intention. Study 2 further shows that after having shared a prior moral behavior on social media, when making a decision for the present, people are more likely to engage in a subsequent good deed; however, this effect is diminished when people are making such a decision for the future.

This work provides important implications for marketing managers and policymakers. In particular, this research suggests that social sharing can be an effective tool to encourage individuals’ consistent moral behavior so as to promote individual and collective well-being. Moreover, the findings demonstrate that temporal distance and social sharing can interact to reduce the moral licensing effect. In practice, this research contributes to the development of effective marketing strategies, particularly for those companies that aim to integrate sustainability into their business practices.

In contrast to previous research examining the cognitive approach to curbing moral licensing, this research explores a new, powerful behavioral approach to alleviating the moral licensing effect. Furthermore, this research consolidates previous findings on the relationship between identity signaling and self-regard, increases the scope of identity signaling research and offers a bridge between research on identity signaling and research on moral licensing. Finally, this research adds to understanding of moral licensing by showing that the moral licensing effect may vary depending on contextual factors and, therefore, is more malleable than previously thought, which opens up future research opportunities to explore when and how the moral licensing effect can be alleviated.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how voluntary citizenship behaviour towards an individual (VCB-I) is linked with vicious knowledge hiding (VKH), and why members, within a mastery climate, tend to participate in less VKH after their engaging in VCB-I. The authors, according to the moral licensing theory, propose that moral licensing mediates the relationship between VCB-I and VKH, and that a mastery climate weakens the hypothesised link via moral licensing.

This study surveys 455 valid matching samples of subordinates and supervisors from 77 working teams in China at two time points and explores the relationship between VCB and VKH, as well as the underlying mechanism. A confirmatory factor analysis, bootstrapping method and hierarchical linear model were used to validate the research hypotheses.

The results show that VCB-I has a significant positive effect on VKH; moral credentials play a mediating role in the relationship between VCB-I and VKH; and the mastery climate moderates the positive effect of moral credentials on VKH and the mediating effect of moral credentials. In a high-mastery climate, the direct effect of moral credentials on VKH and the indirect influence of VCB-I on VKH through moral credentials are both weakened, and conversely, both effects are enhanced in a low-mastery climate. However, contrary to the expected hypothesis, moral credits do not mediate the relationship between VCB-I and VKH, which may be due to the differences in the mechanisms between the two moral licensing models.

Prior research has mainly focused on the “victim-centric” perspective to examine the impacts of others’ behaviour on employees’ knowledge hiding. Few works have used the “actor-centric” perspective to analyse the relationship between employees’ prior workplace behaviour and their subsequent knowledge hiding intention. In addition, this study enriches the field research on the voluntary aspects of organisational citizenship behaviour, which differs from its involuntary ones.

The present study aims to demonstrate that the volunteering licenses people to indulge in luxury purchase, and both heightened moral self-evaluation and reduced guilt mediate the effect of licensing on ratings of a luxury item by implementing three experimental studies. This study explained the moral licensing behavior using a passive goal guidance model: i.e., people license themselves to indulge when people perceive progress on one of their long-term goals.

In this paper, three experiments were used to test hypotheses.

The present paper is new in terms of three aspects. First, moral self-evaluation as a mediator is tested using a more stringent method in comparison to prior studies. Second, reduced guilt which had not yet been explicitly tested is established as a mediator. Third, the present study demonstrates that the passive goal guidance model as a valid theory in explaining the licensing behavior by showing that when people perceive progress in a long-term goal by helping others in need, they are more likely to engage in dysfunctional luxury brand purchases. Previous studies have used credentialing theory to explain this.

The present study established and confirmed that reduced guilt is a mediator in the licensing effect on the purchase of luxury items.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the moral licensing effect of other in-group members' organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) on focal employees' organizational deviance through moral self-concept. This paper also examines the moderating role of in-group identification in the mediated relationship.

The multilevel path analysis and bootstrapping technique are employed to analyze the findings of a sample of 340 employees in 56 workgroups in Vietnam.

The results demonstrate that moral self-concept mediates the positive relationship between other in-group members' OCB and focal employees' organizational deviance. Furthermore, the findings indicate that in-group identification strengthens the indirect effect of other in-group members' OCB on focal employees' organizational deviance via moral self-concept.

The findings suggest that managers should be aware of the potential negative consequences of OCB and the drawbacks of in-group identification in group contexts. In addition, practitioners should proactively prevent other in-group members' OCB from resulting in employees' organizational deviance.

This is the first study to examine the moral licensing effect of OCB on organizational deviance through the moral self-concept mechanism and the moderating role of in-group identification in this mediated relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize how past corporate social responsibility (CSR) affects the occurrence of organizational misconduct by the means of moral licensing.

To this end, the authors conduct a conceptual review and develop a framework illustrating how moral credits and moral credentials (moral licensing) may institutionalize irresponsibility and lead to subsequent misconduct.

The authors propose a conceptual framework that describes the relationship between past CSR and organizational misconduct by the means of moral licensing. Based on initial literature-based findings, this paper provides confirmatory evidence for the authors’ framework and illustrates that past CSR might be used as a moral licensing tool that eventually fosters the occurrence of organizational misconduct.

The authors propose future researchers account for the moral licensing effect when examining the antecedents of misconduct and explore the potential moderators of this effect.

The authors recommend that organizations establish management control systems that specifically address the issue of moral licensing when evaluating CSR initiatives. The authors also propose that organizations should adhere to a consistent CSR strategy that potentially fosters the selection of moral leaders who are not prone to moral licensing.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to connect corporate social responsibility, moral licensing and organizational misconduct from a conceptual perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of religion, morality and mindset in influencing perceptions of luxury products.

The study uses three experimental studies to investigate this relationship.

Study 1 shows that religiosity influences negative moral emotions (but not positive moral emotions), which then negatively influence luxury consumption and morality evaluations. Study 2 replicates the effects of Study 1 and shows that priming a moral (marketplace) mindset decreases negative moral emotions and increases luxury consumption evaluations for highly (less) religious consumers. Study 3 explains the effects found in Studies 1 and 2 as driven by moral licensing, such that priming a moral (marketplace) mindset decreases (increases) the negative moral emotions experienced by those primed (not primed) with religiosity. Study 3 also improves the external validity of findings by including a social media sample of regular luxury purchases. Implications for theory and marketing practice are discussed.

The present research is limited by samples conducted in Western culture with a predominantly Western, Christian religious audience. Future research should examine how moral vs marketplace mindsets differentially influence the consumption of luxury products for Eastern religious consumers (e.g. Hindus, Buddhists and Confucianists). Additionally, this research was conducted using Allport and Ross’ (1967) religiosity measure. Some could argue that the measure is not the most representative for atheists or agnostics or is outdated, so further research would benefit from replicating and extending the findings in this paper with other, newer religiosity measures better adapted to measure all belief systems.

Marketers of luxury products should realize the potential of a new target audience – religious consumers. While religiosity is positively correlated with negative moral emotions toward luxury products in Study 1, Studies 2 and 3 reveal that priming a moral mindset can reduce negative affect and increase evaluations of luxury products. Thus, marketers could seek out ways to emphasize morality in messaging. For example, a marketer may incorporate words such as virtues, ethics and/or noble, when describing attributes of their brand in advertising, thereby resulting in a moral licensing effect. Research suggests advertising content has the potential to influence consumers’ perceived moral obligation, inclusive of the moral or immoral nature of the consumption of luxury brands.

While the link between religion and luxury goods is evident in popular culture, previous research has yet to empirically explore this relationship. This study fills this gap by investigating the role of religiosity on the perceived morality and ultimately the purchase of luxury branded goods.

While the positive effects of customer citizenship behavior are well established, research on its potential negative consequences is scarce. This study aims to examine the indirect relationship between customer citizenship and dysfunctional customers via customer moral credits and entitlement, as well as the moderating influence of customer citizenship fatigue.

Study 1 employed a cross-sectional design with a self-administered survey. The data were collected from 314 customers using an online research panel. In Study 2, the authors manipulated customer citizenship behavior using 203 participants to establish causality and rule out alternative explanations of the findings of Study 1. In Study 3, the authors replicated Study 2 and enhanced internal validity by using a more controlled experimental design using 128 participants.

This study shows that when customer citizenship fatigue is high, customer citizenship behavior elicits customer moral credit, which leads to customer entitlement and, in turn, promotes dysfunctional customer behavior. Conversely, when customer citizenship fatigue is low, customer citizenship behavior does not generate moral credit or entitlement, preventing dysfunctional customer behavior.

The study shows that promoting customer citizenship behavior does not always lead to positive outcomes. Therefore, when promoting customer citizenship behavior, managers should consider the psychological licensing process and ways to mitigate the influence of moral credits.

This study challenges common wisdom and investigates the dark side of customer citizenship behavior. Specifically, it demonstrates that customer citizenship behavior could backfire (e.g. dysfunctional customer behavior). It also shows that only customers who experience a high level of fatigue from their citizenship behaviors are psychologically licensed to gain moral credit, leading to dysfunctional customer behavior.

While most corporate social responsibility (CSR) research has focused on its positive effects, the potential “dark side” of CSR has received scant attention. Grounded in vicarious moral licensing theory and insights from related literature, the current study examines how employees' perceptions of external CSR could result in unintentional negative consequences like unethical pro-organizational behavior via psychological entitlement. The study also investigates the direct and conditional effects of private self-awareness.

A two-wave survey of 609 full-time employees from various occupations was conducted to empirically test the hypotheses. Several techniques and remedies were applied to control the quality of the sample data and mitigate the effects of potential common method bias.

The results demonstrate that unethical pro-organizational behavior can be an unintentional negative outcome of perceived external CSR, and psychological entitlement mediates the relationship.

This work contributes to the moral licensing literature by examining vicarious moral licensing in the work domain. It offers several new and significant implications for research on CSR, psychological entitlement, and unethical pro-organizational behavior. The results suggest that managers should be mindful of unethical pro-organizational behavior as a potential negative consequence of external CSR engagement.

This study is among the first attempts to examine vicarious moral licensing in the work domain and investigates a largely neglected research area – the negative aspect of external CSR.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether moral licensing – that is, doing something morally dubious after doing the “right” thing – influences the attractiveness of an existing virtue–vice bundle.

A prize-linked savings (PLS) account that combines a savings (certificate of deposit) and a probabilistic component (lottery) was examined. In two online experiments, the level of moral license offered by the PLS was manipulated through what institution offered the PLS or a lottery alternative.

When the source of the PLS account was more moral (Study 1) or the source of the lottery was less moral (Study 2), the interest in the PLS increased.

Moral licensing plays a role in making virtue–vice bundles appealing and supports that the need for moral license can be used to increase interest in more morally acceptable behaviour. However, manipulating moral license in the field is complex and requires further research.

Practitioners may increase PLS savings rates via messaging that emphasises how the saving aspect offers the customer the license to indulge in the gamble; similar to how McDonald’s sold the idea of indulging in fast food with “You deserve a break today”.

This paper shows that the attractiveness of the PLS virtue–vice bundle is sensitive to the moral acceptability of the components, suggesting their ability to offer the consumer moral license to engage in a socially sanctioned action is part of their appeal. Also, demonstrating that the desire for moral license can be used to encourage positive behaviour.

We use a laboratory experiment to examine a multitask environment common to practice, in which managers have multiple responsibilities, including both managerial reporting, as in participative budgeting settings, and effort provision toward daily tasks. Consistent with typical contracting arrangements, we examine incomplete contracts where honesty and effort are not enforceable. In such a multitask environment, when employers choose to offer comparatively generous wages to managers, we predict that managers will elect to provide higher effort. Meanwhile, we remain agnostic ex ante about the degree of misreporting due to findings in studies on gift exchange, moral licensing, and moral wiggle room. Overall, we find evidence that reciprocity, consistent with the gift-exchange model, does extend across both tasks. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.