From committed employees to rebels: the role of prosocial rule-breaking, age, and entrepreneurial self-efficacy

Abstract

Exploring the critical but largely overlooked rule-breaking nature of entrepreneurship, we study how a specific form of rule-breaking—prosocial rule-breaking (PSRB), can impact people’s entrepreneurial career intentions. Based on the virtue-based model of entrepreneurial rule-breaking, stewardship theory, and the expectancy framework, we expect that employees’ affective organizational commitment will lead to employees’ PSRB, which, under some conditions, is related to their tendency to quit and start new businesses. Our moderated mediation analyses on time-lagged data from two samples in China support an indirect relationship between affective organizational commitment and entrepreneurial intentions mediated by PSRB and moderated by age and entrepreneurial self-efficacy simultaneously. We discuss theoretical and practical implications.