Does Being Envied and Ostracized Make Employees Unethical?

Abstract

Concern has been growing about employees’ poor ethical judgment, which hurts their organizations’ business interests. While leaders play significant roles in affecting employees’ ethical judgment, the roles of coworkers have been largely ignored. Addressing this gap, the goal of this study is to examine whether, why, and when perceptions of being envied and ostracized by coworkers are related to unethical judgment. Guided by Affective Events Theory, which proposes that affective events at work create emotions that produce affect-laden outcomes, we argue that an employee’s perception that coworkers are giving him or her the “silent treatment” breeds anger, which in turn promotes unethical judgment. Data collected from 258 college-graduate employees at three points over an 8-month period supported the proposed relationships. In addition, we found that ethical leadership buffered the effects of perceptions of being envied and ostracized on anger. These findings contribute to the literature by showing that perceptions of coworkers’ mistreatment can increase employees’ unethical judgment, but that managers’ ethical leadership is an important means of alleviating these effects.