Employees’ unethical pro-organizational behavior and subsequent internal whistle-blowing
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate how perpetrators who engage in unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) feel and respond in the aftermath of such behavior.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper used a two-wave time-lagged design and collected data from 260 full-time employees working in different industries in China.
Findings
The results indicated that UPB was negatively and indirectly associated with internal whistle-blowing through shame. Perceived moral leadership weakened the effect of shame on internal whistle-blowing.
Originality/value
Based on affective events theory, this paper explored an integrated behavior-emotion-behavior sequence. This paper proposed that the negative emotion, shame, evoked by UPB subsequently influences the extent to which UPB perpetrators engage in internal whistle-blowing.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Funding: This research was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 72071124.
Author contributions: The first two authors made an equal contribution to the current manuscript.
Data availability statement: The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Conflict of interest: All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Declaration: All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000(5). Informed consent was obtained from all patients (employees) for being included in the study. No animal studies were carried out by the authors for this study.
Citation
Chen, L. and Zhang, S. (2024), "Employees’ unethical pro-organizational behavior and subsequent internal whistle-blowing", Chinese Management Studies, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/CMS-11-2023-0604
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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