Saint organizations: Too good to be true? Identity tensions of positive deviance for members.

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a conceptual model that demonstrates how positive deviance can produce dysfunctional effects in organizations. Our research objective is to extend the traditional understanding and vocabulary of organizational negative deviance to include the opposite deviant side of “normality”, namely positive deviance in the form of saint organizations whose deviance is a positive over-conformity to moral norms. Saint organizations acquire their saint status as they are exposed to a high public visibility that includes an extra-ordinary virtuous valence and a dedicated emphasis on contributing to the social betterment of the planet and its peoples. Whereas prior research has focused on how such public positive admiration strengthens organizational member identification, we offer a conceptualization that shows how the public’s large-scale admiration of an organization’s moral over-conformity may instead lead to identity tensions, when members become addicted to the public admiration of the organizational moral identity. We refer to this phenomenon as saint junkies, where members over-identify with the organizational moral identity attributed by the public to their workplace. We provide a heuristic model that explains the process from positive deviance to saint junkies that results in five identity tensions for members: onstage burnout, sense of fakeness, risk of hybris, moral drift, and exaggerated ego-defenses. We conclude by suggesting venues for future empirical and theoretical studies of saint organizations and their implications for organizational members.