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When the Punisher is Both Potential Victim and (Intended) Beneficiary: Investigating Observers’ Attitudinal and Behavioral Reactions Toward Organizational Punishment Severity for Unethical Pro-Organizational Behaviors

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Abstract

While unethical behaviors that are intended to benefit the self are often severely punished, unethical behaviors that are intended to benefit the organization (unethical pro-organizational behaviors, UPBs) are disciplined within organizations at different levels of severity. Building on the sensemaking theoretical framework, we study how employees make sense of what the organization is like through observing what the organization has done (i.e., different levels of punishment imposed for UPBs) and how employees subsequently react to the results of sensemaking (i.e., affective commitment to the organization)—increased or decreased turnover and UPB engagement intention. By conducting a vignette-based experimental study and a time-lagged field study, we find that affective commitment to the organization of observers, especially those with a high moral disengagement propensity, increases at a low-to-moderate level of punishment severity for UPBs, and decreases at a moderate-to-high level of punishment severity for UPBs. Furthermore, the impacted affective commitment to the organization subsequently leads to increase in observers’ UPB engagement (intention) and decrease in observers’ turnover intention. We also highlight implications for theory and practice.

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Data availability

We complied with all guidelines for the ethical treatment of human participants and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The materials and designs of our studies were also approved by the Institutional Review Board of Peking University (#IRB #2022-21 for study 1, IRB #2021-11 for study 2, and IRB #2023-03 for the supplementary study). The data and materials underpinning the studies are available upon request from the authors.

Notes

  1. A simple survey among part-time MBA students also showed that employees in the workplace can acknowledge the pro-organizational intention behind their colleagues’ UPBs because they can easily identify that the organization is the primary beneficiary of these conducts. A summary of the results of this survey could be found at https://osf.io/rw4dn/?view_only=73822ea6da0449e1b52c2e1651c0e286.

  2. Although our research does not directly focus on whether observers react differently to various levels of punishment severity for UPBs versus unethical self-serving behaviors, we expect that a severe punishment for unethical self-serving behaviors will increase (or at least will not harm) observers’ affective commitment to the organization, as these unethical behaviors violate ethical norms and cause harm to the organization as well as the observers. This assertion is supported by our supplementary experimental study, which can be found at https://osf.io/kbhxw/?view_only=cac15d39d6144eaaa719b675d80f8df9.

  3. We thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing out this ambiguity for us.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Dr. Mo Chen for his constructive advice on an early draft. We appreciate Dr. Elizabeth Umphress for her suggestions to design the experiment. We also thank Ms. Yun Wang for her assistance with data collection.

Funding

This research was supported by the grants funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72202033) and Research Development Fund of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (No. RDF-22-02-067).

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Author notes

  1. Xuemei Liu and Ying Wang equally contributed to this work and jointly shared the first authorship.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business Administration, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, China

    Xuemei Liu

  2. Business School, University of International Business and Economics, Beijing, 100029, China

    Ying Wang

  3. School of Economics & Management, Southeast University, Nanjing, China

    Fan Yang

  4. International Business School Suzhou, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China

    Qianyao Huang

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Contributions

XL, YW, and FY contributed to study’s conception and design. XL collected data, YW and FY performed data analysis. YW and FY drafted the first version of the manuscript. XL, YW, and FY commented and refined later versions before the first submission. YW, FY, and QH prepared the revised version of manuscript and composed the response letter to the reviewers. All authors approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Ying Wang.

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Liu, X., Wang, Y., Yang, F. et al. When the Punisher is Both Potential Victim and (Intended) Beneficiary: Investigating Observers’ Attitudinal and Behavioral Reactions Toward Organizational Punishment Severity for Unethical Pro-Organizational Behaviors. J Bus Ethics (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-024-05642-x

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