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Will Creative Employees Always Make Trouble? Investigating the Roles of Moral Identity and Moral Disengagement

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Abstract

Recent research has uncovered the dark side of creativity by finding that creative individuals are more likely to engage in unethical behavior. However, we argue that not all creative individuals make trouble. Using moral self-regulation theory as our overarching theoretical framework, we examine individuals’ moral identity as a boundary condition and moral disengagement as a mediating mechanism to explain when and how individual creativity is associated with workplace deviant behavior. We conducted two field studies using multi-source data to test our hypotheses. In Study 1, the results indicated that creativity positively predicted moral disengagement for those low in moral identity. In Study 2 with multi-wave data, we replicated the finding that moral identity moderated the effect of creativity on moral disengagement in Study 1 and further revealed that moral disengagement mediated the interactive effects of creativity and moral identity on workplace deviant behavior. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.

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Notes

  1. We recognize that workplace deviant behavior and unethical behavior are not exactly the same thing, despite the overlap in most of their elements (Sackett et al. 2006). Workplace deviant behavior involves intentional acts that violate organizational norms and hurt organizations and their members (Bennett and Robinson 2003), while unethical behavior involves acts that violate widely accepted social norms. Sometimes, employees’ certain behavior (e.g., working slowly) violates organizational norms but not social norms, while some other behavior (e.g., lying to consumers) violates social norms but not organizational norms (Robinson and Bennett 1995). In this research, we focus on workplace deviant behavior rather than all forms of unethical behavior, as workplace deviant behavior is pervasive and particularly detrimental to both organizations’ functioning and employees’ benefits (Mount et al. 2006). Unless otherwise indicated, for simplicity, we used “workplace deviant behavior” and “unethical or immoral behavior in organizational settings/at workplace” interchangeably in this research.

  2. These variables were included mainly because (1) they represent the rules, control, and monitoring at the group level and (2) they have potential impacts on creativity or deviance. For example, group innovation climate implies less control and monitoring and was found to be influential on creativity (Somech and Drach-Zahavy 2013), while ethical climate and group ethical efficacy (i.e., more rules) were critical situational factors that might influence deviant behaviors (Arnaud and Schminke 2012; Chen et al. 2013). Besides, authoritarian leadership representing the leader’s “absolute authority and control over subordinates and demands unquestionable obedience from subordinates” (Cheng et al. 2004, p. 91) and personal control (i.e., less monitoring) were also found to impact creativity (Liu et al. 2011; Zhang et al. 2011). In addition, similar to ethical climate, ethical leadership (i.e., more rules and standards) was chosen as a control variable because it might act as a critical situational factor that impacts deviant behaviors (Brown and Treviño 2006; Ng and Feldman 2015).

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Funding

This research was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71771133, 71502179, 71728005, 71632002), by National Science Foundation of the United States of America (Grant No. 1632417), and by a Fulbright Scholarship, sponsored by the US government.

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Author notes

  1. Xiaoming Zheng, Xin Qin, Xin Liu, and Hui Liao have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Xiaoming Zheng & Xin Liu

  2. Sun Yat-sen Business School, Sun Yat-sen University, No. 135, Xinggang West Road, Guangzhou, 510275, Guangdong, China

    Xin Qin

  3. Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Hui Liao

Authors
  1. Xiaoming Zheng
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  2. Xin Qin
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  3. Xin Liu
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  4. Hui Liao
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Correspondence to Xin Qin.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Zheng, X., Qin, X., Liu, X. et al. Will Creative Employees Always Make Trouble? Investigating the Roles of Moral Identity and Moral Disengagement. J Bus Ethics 157, 653–672 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3683-3

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