The Paradox of Group Citizenship and Constructive Deviance: A Resolution of Environmental Dynamism and Moral Justification

Tingting Liu, Yahui Chen, Chenhong Hu, Xiao Yuan, Chang-E Liu and Wei He
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Tingting Liu: College of Business Administration, Hunan University of Technology and Business, Changsha 410205, China
Yahui Chen: School of Business and Tourism Management, Yunnan University, Kunming 650106, China
Chenhong Hu: College of Business Administration, Hunan University of Technology and Business, Changsha 410205, China
Xiao Yuan: College of Business Administration, Hunan University of Technology and Business, Changsha 410205, China
Chang-E Liu: Mobile E-Business Collaborative Innovation Center of Hunan Province, Key Laboratory of Hunan Province for Mobile Business Intelligence, College of Business Administration, Hunan University of Technology and Business, Changsha 410205, China
Wei He: Scott College of Business, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN 47802, USA

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 22, 1-15

Abstract: Previous research on antecedents to constructive deviance remains scattered and inclusive. Our study conceptualizes constructive deviance from the perspective of ethical decision making and explores its antecedents, mechanism, and conditions. Drawing on moral licensing theory and social information processing theory, we propose that group citizenship behavior facilitates moral justification and constructive deviance when environmental dynamism is high and inhibits them when it is low; and moral justification fully mediates the relationship between the interaction of group citizenship behavior and environmental dynamism and constructive deviance. With two-wave panel data collected from 339 employees in 54 groups of five service companies in retailing, finance, and tourism randomly selected from three provinces in southern China, these hypotheses are all supported empirically. Our findings broaden the antecedents and occurrence mechanism of constructive deviance through an ethical decision-making lens. Our study contributes to the moral licensing literature by enriching the sources of moral licensing in the workplace and empirically demonstrating that moral justification may function as an underlying mechanism of moral licensing.

Keywords: constructive deviance; group citizenship behavior; environmental dynamism; moral justification; moral licensing theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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