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Under Pressure: LMX Drives Employee Unethical Pro-organizational Behavior via Threat Appraisals

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Abstract

Drawing on the transactional model of stress and leader-member exchange (LMX) theory, we examine the role of performance pressure in relation to unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB). We propose that (1) employee perceived performance pressure and LMX interact to increase employees’ willingness to engage in UPB, and (2) employees’ threat appraisal mediates this interaction effect. The results from two studies based on samples of employees in the United States and China supported our theoretical model. We found that LMX moderated the relation between performance pressure and the willingness to engage in UPB, such that the relation was stronger when LMX was high (Study 1). Moreover, the conditional indirect effect (i.e., performance pressure on UPB through threat appraisal with LMX as a moderator at the first stage) was also supported (Study 2). These findings highlight the role of performance pressure and LMX in inducing unethical work behaviors that are aimed at benefiting the organization (i.e., UPB). Theoretical and managerial implications are also discussed.

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Notes

  1. We do not discuss harm appraisal because losses have not occurred when employees evaluate their performance requirements.

  2. We also conducted a CFA marker variable analysis using social desirability as the marker variable. Following Williams et al.’s (2010) procedure, we detected common method variance. However, the subsequent test showed that method variance did not significantly influence the relationships between the study variables (9% of the observed variance was attributable to social desirability).

  3. A helpful reviewer pointed out that our missing data approach assumed that data were missing at random. However, some personality traits (e.g., Conscientiousness and Agreeableness) can influence participants’ nonresponses (Rogelberg et al., 2003). Given the possibility that our study variables can be conceptually relevant to these two personality traits, there is likely to be a downward bias in the estimated relationships. That is, when data are not missing at random, the estimates are downwardly biased via indirect range restriction (Newman & Cottrell, 2015).

  4. We also did two additional analyses to ensure the robustness of our results. (1) We list-wise deleted all the missing data and fitted the same path model (N = 452). (2) As suggested by a helpful reviewer, we fitted the same model based on the latent variables. The results remained unchanged.

  5. We note that the moderating effects found in our paper (see Tables 3 and 6) are likely empirically underpowered as the associated t-values are both under 2.81, meaning that the observed power is probably lower than .80 (see Bliese & Wang, 2020). We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this issue.

  6. We thank a helpful anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

  7. We thank an anonymous reviewer for offering guidance on how to discuss and explicate this issue.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, Project ID: 72102095 and 72073102), fundings from Illinois Leadership Center (Illinois Leadership® Center), and fundings from the School of Labor and Employment Relations at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (https://ler.illinois.edu).

Funding

National Natural Science Foundation of China (72102095 and 72073102,Wu Wei); Illinois Leadership Center.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kogod School of Business, American University, Washington, DC, USA

    Chen Tang

  2. College of Business, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, USA

    Ying Chen

  3. Economics and Management School, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Wu Wei

  4. School of Labor & Employment Relations and Department of Psychology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA

    Daniel A. Newman

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Tang, C., Chen, Y., Wei, W. et al. Under Pressure: LMX Drives Employee Unethical Pro-organizational Behavior via Threat Appraisals. J Bus Ethics (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-023-05534-6

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