How Organizational Transgressions Can Prompt Prosocial and Deviant Behavior in Employees via Guilt

Abstract

Despite efforts to reduce ethical misconduct by organizations, many organizations occasionally act unethically. Understanding the outcomes of such organizational transgressions is important, as this can facilitate organizational recovery and prevent future transgressions. However, whereas scholars have identified numerous detrimental outcomes of organizational transgressions for organizations, we have a poor understanding of how transgressions at the organizational level can impact employees. Drawing on attribution theories of emotion, we argue that employees can experience vicarious guilt in response to an organizational transgression. Guilt, in turn, may prompt employees to engage in prosocial behaviors targeted at external parties as well as deviant behaviors targeted at the organization. Our hypotheses were supported across three studies: a critical incident recall experiment with a diverse sample of full-time employees, an interactive scenario-based experiment with a student sample, and a two-wave survey with members of a single organization. Theoretically, our studies provide insight into individual-level responses to organizational transgressions, advance our understanding of vicarious guilt in organizational settings, and identify antecedents of prosocial and deviant employee behaviors. Practically, we provide insights that are important for the development of interventions aimed at helping organizations and employees recover from transgressions.