Accounting for personal disposition and organizational context: connecting role ambiguity, public service motivation, and whistle-blowing in federal agencies
研究考察了个人利他倾向与工作情境如何共同影响联邦雇员的举报动机，发现清晰的任务期望会削弱利他倾向对利己举报动机的抑制作用。
Organizational psychologists and HRM scholars have long argued that prosocial organizational behaviors enhance organizational performance. However, prosocial behaviors are motivated by both self-interested and altruistic intent. Moreover, some have recognized that the factors that encourage shifts between egoistically and altruistically motivated prosocial behaviors may result from inherent tensions between individual disposition and situational contexts. As such, this study draws from literature examining prosocial behavior to evaluate whether work situations with clear task expectations dampen the extent to which prosocial personal dispositions diminish egoistically motivated prosocial behavior. Findings from a series of structural equation models reveal that altruistic dispositional traits diminish egoistic motives for engaging in one specific prosocial behavior, whistle-blowing. However, findings also reveal that work situations characterized by clear task expectations dampen the negative effect of altruistic dispositions on egoistically motivated whistle-blowing. Our findings imply that managers can adjust organizational contexts to capitalize on the enhanced benefits resulting from altruistically motivated prosocial behaviors.