Abstract

Despite the antecedents of unethical sales behavior (USB) have been well studied, these literatures primarily focus on the work domain and neglect the spillover effects of the home domain. Drawing on ego depletion theory as an overarching theoretical framework, this research investigates why and how salespersons’ work-family conflict (WFC) at home triggers next day’s USB at work. This study used daily diary data collected from 99 salespeople in two weeks to test the proposed hypotheses. The multilevel path analysis indicates that evening’s WFC positively affects next afternoon’s USB via increased next morning’s ego depletion (ED). Furthermore, service climate was found to moderate this indirect relationship, such that the indirect relationship becomes weaker under high service climate. To the best of my knowledge, this study is one of the first to reveal that salespersons’ daily WFC may serve as a role conflict event and lead to next day’s USB at work, which provides a fine-grained understanding of spillover effects of daily WFC through a daily diary study.