Retail employee pilferage: A study of moral disengagement

Lloyd C. Harris and Hongwei He

Journal of Business Research, 2019, vol. 99, issue C, 57-68

Abstract: Employee pilferage – the unauthorized taking of work property or the means of production on a relatively small scale – is extremely costly. However, very little is known about what psychologically drives frontline retail workers to pilfer. Drawing upon the social cognitive theory of self-regulation, we argue that moral disengagement is the key psychological mechanism that frees retail employees to pilfer in the workplace without experiencing feelings of guilt or self-censure. We further develop and test a conceptual framework that depicts the causes of pilferage moral disengagement by customer-contact retail employees. We find that both moral identity centrality and ethical leadership inhibit pilferage moral disengagement, while cynicism and pilferage norms enhance it. Moreover, moral identity centrality can also alleviate the positive effects of both cynicism and pilferage norms on pilferage moral disengagement. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings and the implications for practice.

Keywords: Retailing; Retail employee pilferage; Ethical leadership; Moral disengagement; Moral identity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296319300980
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:99:y:2019:i:c:p:57-68

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.02.008

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().