Silent Majority: How Employees’ Perceptions of Corporate Hypocrisy are Related to their Silence

Yiming Wang (), Yuhua Xie (), Mingwei Liu (), Yongxing Guo () and Duojun He ()
Additional contact information
Yiming Wang: Hunan University
Yuhua Xie: Hunan University
Mingwei Liu: Rutgers University
Yongxing Guo: Hebei University of Technology
Duojun He: Central South University

Journal of Business Ethics, 2024, vol. 195, issue 2, No 6, 315-334

Abstract: Abstract Extant studies of corporate hypocrisy have largely overlooked its implications for employees until recently. Drawing upon social information processing theory, we theorize the impact of corporate hypocrisy on employee silence—an employee behavior potentially detrimental to both organizations and society, as well as the underlying mediating and moderating mechanisms. We empirically tested our hypotheses with two studies. In Study 1, we found that corporate hypocrisy was positively related to employee silence through both employee cognitive trust and employee prosocial motivation. In Study 2, we revealed that consumer pressure weakened the mediating roles of employee cognitive trust and prosocial motivation, while regulatory pressure strengthened these roles. Overall, this study sheds light on whether, how, and when employees remain silent when they perceive corporate hypocrisy. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Keywords: Corporate hypocrisy; Employee silence; Cognitive trust; Prosocial motivation; Consumer pressure; Regulatory pressure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-024-05647-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:jbuset:v:195:y:2024:i:2:d:10.1007_s10551-024-05647-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-024-05647-6

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().