Leader Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior and Employee Cheating Behavior at Work: The Mediation of Moral Disengagement

In the notorious world of unethical behaviors, much research is conducted; nevertheless, the mechanism linking unethical behavior perpetrated by leaders with the intention of benefitting the organization (i.e., leader unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB)) has received scant attention. In this research, the framework of the social-learning-of-principle is adopted, showing that employees learn principles from what they observe. Then it is translated to moral designment which leads to employee's cheating behavior. In this study, we adopted cross-sectional research with convenience sampling. Hypotheses were tested on a sample of ۲۳۲ employees working in diverse sections of manufacturing, education, health, banking, and public services in different cities in Iran. The results verified both reliability and validity. Using the PROCESS Module of SPSS, the results showed that, after controlling for several variables (i.e., gender, age, education, and tenure), we found overall support for the significant and direct relationship between leader UPB and employees’ cheating at work behavior. In this relationship, employee moral disengagement plays a partial mediator. Several key theoretical and practical implications of this research are mentioned in the discussion section.

کلیدواژه ها:

Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior (UPB) ، Moral Disengagement ، Cheating behavior at work ، social learning ، principle learning