Pro-social Rule Research Articles

Team pro-social rule breaking and team innovation performance: An information processing theory perspective.

Exploring the antecedents that affect the team innovation performance can better promote the organization to research the potential factors to enhance the organizational innovation competitiveness. Drawing upon information processing theory, we develop a moderated mediation model to examine the relationship between team pro-social rule breaking and team innovation performance. A three-wave field study is constructed from two large manufacturing enterprises from 82 team leaders and their 382 subordinates in Shanghai, China. The results reveal that team pro-social rule breaking is positively related to team innovation performance through team reflexivity. In addition, the relationship between team pro-social rule breaking and team innovation performance via team reflexivity is positive only when team learning orientation is high. The implications, limitations, and future research directions of these findings are discussed.

Erratum to: A Study to Determine The Antecedents of The Prosocial Rule Breaking Behaviour: A Qualitative Practice for Hotel Businesses

Erratum to: A Study to Determine The Antecedents of The Prosocial Rule Breaking Behaviour: A Qualitative Practice for Hotel Businesses

How NIL and student athletes are prompting changes in higher education administration

Name, image, and likeness (NIL) policies are expanding rapidly in the United States and affecting the roles of higher education administrators. Athletics compliance officers are dealing with an uncertain and rapidly shifting policy landscape that includes vague state and NCAA regulations and burgeoning third parties trying to capitalize for the sake of schools and athletes. Using interviews with compliance officers at five institutions, we demonstrate how this environment raises novel questions about theories of prosocial rule breaking, discretion, autonomy, and contracting out. This work demonstrates the value of studying sports administration for theorizing and presents future directions for related research.

Effect of proactive personality on employees' pro-social rule breaking: the role of promotion focus and psychological safety climate

Effect of proactive personality on employees' pro-social rule breaking: the role of promotion focus and psychological safety climate

Facilitating and impeding factors to insiders’ prosocial rule breaking in South Korea

Insiders’ security breach in healthcare is a serious issue both to healthcare organizations and to patients. Investigating factors affecting prosocial intention to disclose committed by insiders helps better understand and manage these breaches in healthcare. This study identifies the factors, including contextual factors, personal factors, job factors, and security countermeasures. A research model was developed by incorporating factors that affect student nurse trainees’ security breaches. A scenario-based experiment was conducted to empirically test the model, with student nurse trainees in South Korea. This study found that one contextual factor and several personal factors affect the prosocial intention to disclose.

A Study to Determine The Antecedents of The Prosocial Rule Breaking Behaviour: A Qualitative Practice for Hotel Businesses

A Study to Determine The Antecedents of The Prosocial Rule Breaking Behaviour: A Qualitative Practice for Hotel Businesses

A Study to Determine The Antecedents of The Prosocial Rule Breaking Behaviour: A Qualitative Practice for Hotel Businesses

A Study to Determine The Antecedents of The Prosocial Rule Breaking Behaviour: A Qualitative Practice for Hotel Businesses

Can proactively confessing obtain your embrace? Exploring for leader's pro-social rule-breaking consequences based on a self-verification perspective.

The effect of leader pro-social rule breaking on employees is a critical albeit underexplored topic within the domain of study on the consequences of pro-social rule breaking in organizations. This study attempts to make up for the gap by exploring the relationship between leader pro-social rule breaking and employee voice. Drawing on the theory of self-verification, we theorize that leaders who perform pro-social rule breaking will seek feedback from their subordinates, while employees being sought will be triggered to voice upwardly, the extent to which intensity of voice is moderated by the moral courage of employees. A total of 283 dyads data of supervisor-subordinate from Shanghai, China, in a three-wave time-lagged survey provided support for our hypotheses. The results show that leader pro-social rule breaking is positively related to leader feedback-seeking, which is positively related to employee upward voice and mediates the relationship between the two. Moreover, the positive relationship between leader pro-social rule breaking and leader feedback-seeking as well as the indirect effect of leader pro-social rule breaking on employee upward voice via leader feedback-seeking was weakened when moral courage is high. The present study promotes the theoretical research on the positive results of leader pro-social rule breaking and also suggests that feedback-seeking would be an effective way for leaders to motivate employees' upward voice.

Pro-social Rule Breaking: Evidence From Public Procurement

Pro-social Rule Breaking: Evidence From Public Procurement

The effect of job independence and dignity of job and employee on Pro-Social Rule Breaking with the mediating role of Assertiveness

The effect of job independence and dignity of job and employee on Pro-Social Rule Breaking with the mediating role of Assertiveness

Prosocial rule breaking, ingroups and social norms: Parental decision-making about COVID-19 rule breaking in the UK.

The British public generally adhered to COVID‐19‐related restrictions, but as the pandemic drew on, it became challenging for some populations. Parents with young children were identified as a vulnerable group. We collected rich, mixed‐methods survey data from 99 UK‐based parents (91 mothers) of children under 12, who described their lockdown transgressions. Household mixing was the most prevalent broken rule. Template analysis found that rule breaking was driven by ‘ingroup‐level’ prosocial motivations to protect the mental and social health of family and loved ones, and that parents were ‘engaged’ decision‐makers who underwent careful deliberation when deciding to break rules, making trade‐offs, bending rules, mitigating risks, reaching consensus, and reacting to perceived rule injustices. Cumulative link models found that the perceived reasonableness of rule violations was predicted by social norms. Rules were broken by parents not for antisocial reasons, but for ‘ingroup‐level’ prosocial reasons, linked to supporting loved ones.

Moral disengagement mediates the relationship between idiosyncratic deals and core employees' prosocial rule breaking

The majority of past studies on employees' prosocial rule breaking have focused on the effects of individual traits, work characteristics, or leadership behavior. We used social cognitive theory to examine the effect of idiosyncratic deals on core employees' prosocial rule breaking from the perspective of employee–organization relations. Using a longitudinal design, we conducted a survey with 395 Chinese core employees. The results show that idiosyncratic deals were positively related to core employees' prosocial rule breaking, and that moral disengagement played a partial mediating role in this relationship. This study gives new insight into the processes through which idiosyncratic deals increase core employees' prosocial rule breaking, and provides important suggestions for how to reduce prosocial rule breaking in organizations. Theoretical and practical implications and future research prospects are discussed.

A Moral Balancing Perspective on Employees’ Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior

The current paper seeks to develop and test a serial mediation model linking employees’ unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) and their consequent pro-self and pro-customer deviance. Drawing upon moral balancing theory, cognitive appraisal theory of emotion, and affective events theory, we examine the moral licensing effect of employee UPB on their organizational deviance through feelings of pride and psychological entitlement. Simultaneously, we investigate the moral cleansing effect of employee UPB on their customer-directed prosocial rule breaking via perceived loss of moral credits and feelings of guilt. Additionally, we examine the moderating role of external attribution of UPB on the aforementioned indirect effects. The results based on 340 full-time employees and their supervisors support the proposed serial mediated relationships. The findings further indicate that the strength of those indirect effects varies depending on employees’ external attribution of UPB. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Unpacking the Paradoxical Effects of Leaders’ Follower-Directed Prosocial Rule Breaking on Followers

Given the paradoxical nature of leaders’ follower-directed prosocial rule-breaking, which simultaneously involves sincere effort to help the followers yet violates organizational norms, our work builds a theoretical model to explain employees’ psychological and behavioral reactions to this specific form of leader deviant behavior. Drawing upon social information processing theory, we propose that leaders’ follower-directed prosocial rule breaking signals different social cues and elicits followers’ simultaneously but contrasting feelings: On one hand, perceived acceptability of norm violations (for having behaved in norm-violation ways) and on the other, gratitude (for having done something helpful for the followers). In turn, perceived acceptability of norm violations motivates follower deviance, whereas gratitude motivates leader-directed helping. Results of a time-lagged multisource field survey data offer support for our hypotheses. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of these findings.

Investigating Inclusive Leadership and Pro-Social Rule Breaking in Hospitality Industry: Important Role of Psychological Safety and Leadership Identification.

This study aims to empirically examine the mediating effects of psychological safety and leadership identification on the relationship between inclusive leadership and pro-social rule breaking among hospitality employees. This study analyzes the survey data collected in three waves from 589 employees working in different hotels and restaurants operating in the Northern areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. The scale validity, composite reliability, and hypotheses were assessed through PLS-SEM. The study found that inclusive leadership significantly impacts employees’ pro-social rule-breaking. The study also found that leadership identification and psychological safety partially mediate the relationship between inclusive leadership and pro-social rule-breaking. Hospitality leaders can practice inclusive leadership characteristics because it may significantly enhance employee engagement in pro-social rule-breaking. Through their inclusive features, hospitality leaders can improve employees’ psychological safety and leadership identification, enhancing frontline employees’ pro-social rule-breaking.

Pro-Social Rule Breaking as a Benchmark of Ethical Intelligence in Socio-Technical Systems

The current mainstream approaches to ethical intelligence in modern socio-technical systems have weaknesses. This paper argues that implementing and validating pro-social rule breaking behaviour can be used as a mechanism to overcome these weaknesses and introduce a sample scenario that can be used to validate this behaviour.

Does Self-Sacrifice Make Me Great? Research on the Relationship Between Employee Conscientiousness and Pro-Social Rule Breaking.

Based on the theory of purposeful work behavior, this study proposed that the two facets of employee conscientiousness, namely duty orientation and achievement orientation, have opposite effects on pro-social rule breaking (PSRB). We also explored the moderating effect of employees’ task characteristic (job autonomy) and social characteristic (leader reward omission) on the above relationships. Using two-wave data collected from 216 employee-supervisor dyads, we found that duty orientation was positively related to PSRB, while achievement orientation was negatively related to PSRB. Further, job autonomy, by amplifying employees’ perceived meaningfulness of their higher-order implicit goals, can strengthen the positive effect of duty orientation and the negative effect of achievement orientation on PSRB. Similarly, leader reward omission could also activate the negative effect of achievement orientation and PSRB, but not significantly moderate the positive relationship between duty orientation and PSRB. By separating the distinct role of facet-specific personality, our study sheds light on the relationship between employee conscientiousness and PSRB.

Immune moral models? Pro-social rule breaking as a moral enhancement approach for ethical AI

We are moving towards a future where Artificial Intelligence (AI) based agents make many decisions on behalf of humans. From healthcare decision-making to social media censoring, these agents face problems, and make decisions with ethical and societal implications. Ethical behaviour is a critical characteristic that we would like in a human-centric AI. A common observation in human-centric industries, like the service industry and healthcare, is that their professionals tend to break rules, if necessary, for pro-social reasons. This behaviour among humans is defined as pro-social rule breaking. To make AI agents more human-centric, we argue that there is a need for a mechanism that helps AI agents identify when to break rules set by their designers. To understand when AI agents need to break rules, we examine the conditions under which humans break rules for pro-social reasons. In this paper, we present a study that introduces a ‘vaccination strategy dilemma’ to human participants and analyzes their response. In this dilemma, one needs to decide whether they would distribute COVID-19 vaccines only to members of a high-risk group (follow the enforced rule) or, in selected cases, administer the vaccine to a few social influencers (break the rule), which might yield an overall greater benefit to society. The results of the empirical study suggest a relationship between stakeholder utilities and pro-social rule breaking (PSRB), which neither deontological nor utilitarian ethics completely explain. Finally, the paper discusses the design characteristics of an ethical agent capable of PSRB and the future research directions on PSRB in the AI realm. We hope that this will inform the design of future AI agents, and their decision-making behaviour.

Rule Formalization, Bureaucratic Red Tape, and Prosocial Rule Breaking Among Street-Level Bureaucrats: A Citizen-Centered Perspective

Past research indicates that rules can prevent unbureaucratic behaviors among street-level bureaucrats (SLBs). In this research, I draw upon the citizen-agent narrative to propose that when formalized rules are perceived as red tape that negatively affects citizens, SLBs will be more likely to engage in prosocial rule breaking (PSRB) due to their sympathy for citizens in such a situation. I further propose that this effect will be more pronounced among SLBs who interact more frequently with citizens. Data from a sample of local government employees in Thailand were collected to test these hypotheses. Results from latent moderated mediation structural equation modeling analyses revealed that, while rule formalization has a direct negative effect on PSRB, it leads to an increase in PSRB via red tape perceptions and feelings of sympathy for citizens who suffer from red tape. Contact with citizens was also found to amplify the effect of rule formalization on red tape perceptions, such that rule formalization has a stronger indirect influence on PSRB among SLBs who have more frequent contact with citizens. These results point to the importance of maintaining the “optimal” level of rules in citizen-state interactions to ensure that SLBs can perform their public service work effectively.

Why does counterproductive work behavior lead to pro-social rule breaking? The roles of impression management motives and leader-liking

Why does counterproductive work behavior lead to pro-social rule breaking? The roles of impression management motives and leader-liking