Cleansing or Licensing? Corporate Social Responsibility Reconciles the Competing Effects of Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior on Moral Self-Regulation
研究发现，员工做出亲组织不道德行为后，会同时感到道德亏欠和心理特权，而企业社会责任感知能增强前者、削弱后者，从而增加服务帮助行为、减少越轨行为。
Although emerging actor-centric research has revealed that performing morally laden behaviors shapes how employees behave subsequently, less is known about what work behaviors may emerge following employees’ unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB)—a unique behavior with competing moral connotations. We integrate the moral self-regulation literature with research on micro corporate social responsibility (CSR) to develop and test a theoretical framework articulating how perceived CSR initiatives reconcile the morally paradoxical nature of UPB and how people respond to such behavior. We propose that, given its dual moral nature, performing UPB simultaneously increases feelings of moral deficit (which triggers moral cleansing) and psychological entitlement (which triggers moral licensing). Importantly, perceived CSR initiatives moderate these countervailing psychological experiences by strengthening feelings of moral deficit while weakening psychological entitlement, which respectively result in increased service-oriented helping behavior and decreased deviant behavior. Results from a scenario-based lab study, an online experiment, and two field studies largely corroborate our propositions. This research provides a finer-grained understanding of the complex moral self-regulation processes that employees experience at work and highlights why and how organizations’ CSR initiatives affect employees’ moral mindsets and behaviors.