Pro-social Rule Breaking Research Articles

Merit recruitment, professional advancement opportunities and prosocial rule-breaking among public servants in Greece

Abstract Public servants have a significant impact on peoples’ lives, but we don’t have many reliable estimates of how many employees engage in prosocial rule-breaking (PSRB), a form of constructive deviance. We collected original survey data (N = 497) among a representative sample of Greek public servants and implemented a list experiment to gauge how pervasive PSRB is in Greece’s public sector. Greece is a particularly useful setting in which to study PSRB as the euro crisis created strong reform pressure. We find that public servants who were hired via merit competitions are not less likely to break rules, but this is conditional on their beliefs about career prospects and the fairness of the promotion system. They perceive the professional reward system as biased towards those with political connections and compensate for lack of efficiency by doing favours. This finding raises concerns about the quality of EU reform assessments.

Moral and Spiritual Knots of Healthcare Professionals’ Prosocial Rule-Breaking

Moral and Spiritual Knots of Healthcare Professionals’ Prosocial Rule-Breaking

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.

Rebel with a cause: The effects of leadership encouragement and psychological safety on professionals' prosocial rulebreaking behavior

AbstractA core idea of bureaucratic organizations is that rule‐following is a necessary precondition to pursue the public interest. However, rules may sometimes become dysfunctional, burdensome, and even interfere with public value delivery. In those situations, professionals sometimes engage in prosocial rule‐breaking (PSRB), rather than rule‐following, with the aim to deliver meaningful public services. This article examines leadership encouragement and psychological safety as antecedents of PSRB behavior. Data from two waves of a multi‐source dataset consisting of professionals' self‐reported PSRB behavior and psychological safety (n = 837 and 965 respondents) and their supervisor‐reported encouragement for PSRB behavior (n = 58 and 64 respondents) is used. Findings point to a positive relationship between psychological safety and PSRB. Moreover, the study partly supports the hypothesis that leadership encouragement is associated with higher levels of PSRB, but only under conditions of high psychological safety.

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.

The relationship between institutional climate and constructive deviance

PurposeThis study aims to explore the impact of organizational climates on constructive workplace deviance by examining staff attitudes to four dimensions of institutional climate: academic; administrative; developmental; and financial. Though carried out with exclusively academic staff working in university environments, it has considerable potential as a pilot for adaptation to the needs of managers and carers working with intellectually challenged offenders and their families.Design/methodology/approachData from a purposive (non-probability) sample of 357 academicians used in technical education in public or private organizations were collected electronically using a Likert-type questionnaire. Analytic techniques used in this study include measurement model assessment and structural equation modeling.FindingsRespondents indicated that institutional climate significantly influences employees in how they exhibit constructive deviance in their workplace behavior. Practices such as whistle blowing, prosocial rule-breaking and openly expressing their concerns are common symptoms exhibited in constructive deviant behavior. An employee who is positively influenced by the organization’s climate would stand up against any policy or activity that could disrupt or harm the company’s operations and reputation. Results imply that, of the four climate variables analysed, financial climate has the most influence on positive deviance, followed by developmental and administrative climates, with academic climate having the least influence.Practical implicationsThe current study’s target population is the academicians working as faculty members in the field of technical education, having multiple implications for the management of institutions. The findings of the study emphasize the significance of their workplace policies and ethics. Given the indication that financial climate appeared to be the most influential of the dimensions under study, this would emphasize the need to develop an environment where there is no irrelevant discrimination in pay based solely on gender, caste or creed.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to understand and describe its four key elements together as contributory factors to constructive deviance in an organization.

Prosocial rule-breaking: a systematic literature review

PurposeThis paper aims to conduct a systematic literature review on prosocial rule-breaking (PSRB) and identify the underlying themes using content analysis.Design/methodology/approachThe current review is based on a portfolio of 37 studies collected from different electronic databases. An extensive literature review is done following a four-step methodology to understand the field comprehensively.FindingsThe present article identified themes in the field of PSRB based on antecedents, consequences, moderators and mediators. Further, the identified themes are classified into individual, job and organizational levels. Through a conceptual framework, how antecedents impact PSRB is shown, which leads to diverse consequences.Practical implicationsThrough this study, the authors attempt to help practitioners understand why PSRB behaviors occur in the workplace. Simultaneously, the authors' work helps managers identify potential strategies to evade the adverse effects of PSRB.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is the first systematic review of PSRB. The review also highlighted the gaps and provided future research directions based on the theory, context, characteristics and methodology (TCCM) framework.

Servant leadership and employee prosocial rule-breaking: The underlying effects of psychological safety and compassion at work.

The study intends to investigate the impact of servant leadership on pro-social rule-breaking directly and through the intervening mechanism of psychological safety. More, the study also plans to investigate whether compassion at work moderates the effect of servant leadership on psychological safety and pro-social rule-breaking and the indirect intervening effect of psychological safety between servant leadership and pro-social rule-breaking. Responses were collected from 273 frontline public servants in Pakistan. Using social information processing theory, the results revealed that servant leadership positively influences pro-social rule-breaking and psychological safety and that psychological safety influences pro-social rule-breaking. Results also revealed that psychological safety acts as an intervening mechanism in the relationship between servant leadership and pro-social rule-breaking. Moreover, compassion at work significantly moderates the relationships of servant leadership with psychological safety and pro-social rule-breaking, and that compassion at work ultimately alters the size of the intervening effect of psychological safety between the connection of servant leadership and pro-social rule-breaking.

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.

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

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.

Formation Mechanism of Pro-organizational Rule-breaking Behavior from the Perspective of Digitalization Transformation

Pro-organizational Rule-breaking Behavior (PORB) is a negative organizational behavior which seems conceptually harmful to organizations. However, PORB can both be beneficial to organizations from the perspective of organizational value, and helpful to the facilitation of organizational performance or organizational innovation. PORB is actually acquiesced and encouraged by organizations in a way. In the context of digitalization transformation, due to the turbulent VUCA environment and competitive pressure, PORB even has a tendency to increase. Therefore, the correlative research questions as follows are put forward naturally. How to evaluate PORB objectively? Why do employees know that the behavior violates the organizational rules but still commit it? Is it essentially an individual problem of the employees or a problem of the organizational rules? What are the causes and mechanisms of PORB? There have been many researches on Unethical Pro-organizational Behavior and Pro-social Rule-breaking Behavior, which are closely related to PORB. However, there is neither systematically theoretical support nor efficient guiding measures on PORB for enterprise practice for the time being. Our research aims to study the formation mechanism of PORB in the context of digitalization transformation, which can not only develop the elementary theory of PORB, but also broaden the theories of Pro-social Rule-breaking Behavior and Unethical Pro-organizational Behavior. In practice, the results of our research can promote both the organizational management and governance of PORB.

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.

Breaking rules for moral reasons: Development and validation of the Prosocial and Antisocial Rule-Breaking (PARB) scale.

To determine whether prosocial rule-breaking exists as a separate construct from antisocial rule-breaking and to develop a valid rule-breaking scale with prosocial and antisocial subscales. We hypothesized that (a) rule-breaking would have prosocial and antisocial subfactors; (b) the prosocial rule-breaking subscale would positively associate with prosocial intentions, empathy, moral identity, and guilt proneness, whereas the antisocial rule-breaking subscale would negatively associate with these same factors; and (c) the two subscales would predict prosocial and antisocial cheating behaviors, respectively. We developed the Prosocial and Antisocial Rule-Breaking (PARB) scale using a sample of 497 undergraduates (Study 1) and 257 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers (Study 2). Participants completed all surveys (Studies 1 and 2) and took part in a between-subjects experiment (Study 2) in which cheating behavior was measured in two conditions-when cheating helps others (prosocial) or oneself (antisocial). The final PARB scale demonstrated the expected factor structure (comparative fit index = .96, Tucker-Lewis index = .93, root-mean-square error of approximation = .064; χ² = 177, df = 88, p < .001), with the prosocial (α = .81) and antisocial (α = .93) subscales showing good reliability. Prosocial rule-breaking was positively associated with prosocial intentions, empathy, and guilt proneness, whereas antisocial rule-breaking was negatively associated with these same factors. Each additional point in prosocial rule-breaking PARB score predicted a 37% increased likelihood of participating in protest behavior in an exploratory investigation (p = .025) and predicted a 268% increase in actual prosocial cheating behavior (p < .001) but did not predict antisocial cheating behavior (p = .293). Conversely, each additional point in antisocial rule-breaking PARB score did not predict protest participation (p = .410) but did predict a 69% increase in actual antisocial cheating behavior (p = .025). These findings suggest that our current understanding of rule-breaking is limited, as many types of rule-breaking are prosocially motivated and are not necessarily antisocial. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

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.

When and Why Does Prosocial Rule-Breaking Behavior Fall into Dilemma? A Moral Balancing Perspective

Existing research has uniformly demonstrated that prosocial rule-breaking behavior is a double-edged sword. However, when and why it functions so is less studied. This article draws upon the moral balance model to propose that when the rules climate is high, employees who engage in prosocial rule-breaking behavior will subsequently perceive loss of moral credits, which in turn increases organizational citizenship behavior. Furthermore, when the rules climate is low, employees who engage in prosocial rule-breaking behavior will produce psychological entitlement, fueling counterproductive behavior. Results from an experiment and a multisource field study support our hypotheses. Taken together, our research provides new insight into understanding the perils and benefits of employees' prosocial rule-breaking behavior and reveals the importance of exploring organizational moral climate in this distinct process. Finally, implications for theory and implementation are discussed.

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.