How Good Citizens Enable Bad Leaders

Effective leaders motivate and inspire their teams to engage in what scholars call citizenship behaviors, which go above and beyond job requirements to benefit the organization.1 These behaviors include helping coworkers, taking on additional responsibilities, sharing innovative solutions, and putting in extra hours when necessary. They contribute to company performance by saving scarce resources, increasing organizational stability, enhancing team effectiveness, and making the workplace more attractive.2

Citizenship behaviors can also benefit the individuals who demonstrate them. For instance, they’re associated with positive energy, increased social capital, and higher ratings on performance evaluations.3 One might expect employees who experience such benefits to continue the behaviors. However, a recent line of research on moral self-licensing suggests that today’s good citizens may sometimes feel entitled to behave like bad apples in the future.

That’s because of a human tendency to balance out virtuous acts with subsequent behavior that is less virtuous.4 For example, research shows that people are more likely to cheat and steal after buying environmentally friendly products than they are after buying conventional ones, and they’re more likely to express prejudice after recommending a Black or female candidate for a job.5 Moral self-licensing occurs in the workplace, too: In field studies, employees who engaged in citizenship behaviors because they felt compelled to do so by their organizations, not because of their own intrinsic desires, were more likely to feel licensed to engage in subsequent deviant behavior, such as acting rudely toward coworkers or slacking off.6

Building on such findings, research further shows that people also engage in vicarious moral licensing, granting themselves leeway to do bad things in light of good deeds performed by those who are interpersonally close to them.7 In the workplace, for instance, an employee might claim a moral license to spend the afternoon “cyber-loafing” after a colleague spent the previous weekend finishing up a project to meet a team deadline.

So even though effective leaders inspire their team members to be good citizens, we can’t assume that employees’ citizenship behaviors will then inspire leaders to respond in kind. Rather, leaders may feel entitled to take credit for their teams’ good deeds, thereby psychologically freeing themselves to engage in unethical behavior.

We recently investigated this possibility.8 Here, we’ll share our findings and the implications we see for leadership.

Two Factors That Tip the Scales

In two studies, after asking senior and midlevel managers working in different organizations who were enrolled in an executive training program to reflect on their teams’ recent citizenship behaviors, we used a validated scale to gauge how morally licensed they felt. The 136 participants in the first study also completed an activity that made them feel either more or less narcissistic, thus increasing or reducing what psychologists call state narcissism — a temporary condition rather than a trait, but still characterized by the feelings of self-importance, grandiosity, and entitlement associated with the personality disorder. The 145 participants in the second study were asked how much they identified with their team members. Both factors made a difference. Moral licensing was significantly more likely among leaders who felt narcissistic or identified with their team members than among those who didn’t fall into either category.

In a third study, we asked 250 leaders to complete two surveys at the start of a workday — one assessing narcissistic personality (that is, their level of trait narcissism) and one assessing how much they identified with their team members. They then went about their work and documented their team members’ citizenship behaviors over the course of that day. The following morning, they answered questions to gauge their feelings of moral licensing. And that evening, they rated the extent to which they had performed unethical deeds that day, such as taking extra personal time, passing blame for errors on to an innocent coworker, and claiming credit for someone else’s work. Here we found that leaders whose teams engaged in more acts of citizenship reported more moral licensing and more unethical behavior, but this was true only among leaders who were narcissistic or who identified closely with their team members.

Since our findings implicate both trait and state narcissism, any leader could fall prey to moral licensing — everyone feels narcissistic at times. And identifying closely with team members is hardly rare.

What does all this mean if you want to select, develop, and manage leaders who will constructively build on their teams’ good deeds? Let’s consider how organizations might mitigate or prevent the conditions that can give rise to vicarious moral licensing.

Reducing Leader Narcissism

Both trait and state narcissism make people more likely to claim credit for the accomplishments of others.9 What’s more, our findings indicate that when either type of narcissism is a factor, leaders who are in a legitimate position to take some credit for their team’s performance are especially likely to feel morally licensed as a result of members’ good deeds.

Employers can’t entirely prevent leader narcissism, since we all occasionally feel narcissistic and may behave accordingly. But they can be on the lookout for trait narcissism when hiring and promoting leaders. Research suggests that one-third of millennials have a narcissistic personality compared with one-eighth of the prior generation, so vicarious moral licensing may become increasingly common as more of these individuals move into leadership roles.10 Although it may be tempting to screen for trait narcissism using personality tests, researchers have pointed out that such tests may be discriminatory because people who are younger, male, or Black tend to score higher on them, while Asian Americans score lower.11 And the tests would be flawed even if discrimination weren’t a problem. Given that everyone feels narcissistic at times, the results would inevitably yield some false positives for the personality trait.

It’s probably more fruitful and less intrusive to look at applicants’ past behavior for evidence of narcissism — or to search for signs of empathy, which narcissists tend to lack. Behavior-based questions during the interview (“Tell me about a time when … ”) can be revealing. Organizations can also gather such information from references and screen résumés for prosocial activities (for example, volunteering for charities).

Once you’ve hired a narcissist, little can be done to change their personality. But leaders who do not have a narcissistic personality can be nudged to feel narcissistic less often. For example, you can focus their attention on group accomplishments rather than individual contributions.12 State narcissism changes on a daily basis, rising in response to events such as winning a big award or receiving praise. Leaders can be coached to recognize feelings of grandiosity and arrogance, which are associated with narcissism, around such events. Once they’ve developed that awareness, they can employ counterbalancing techniques that demonstrate humility, such as showing a willingness to learn from others or admitting when they’ve made mistakes.13

Although praise for work that benefits the organization is generally a positive thing, executives should find ways to connect their praise for leaders with an outlet for any feelings of entitlement it might generate. For example, they might reward the leader and the team equally by giving them all an afternoon off. That would not only remind the leader that the accomplishments are shared but also provide an organizationally sanctioned way to “spend” any moral license that results from the praise.

Channeling Identity

When leaders identify closely with their teams, they tend to follow group norms and share pride in group outcomes.14 There is nothing inherently wrong with this tendency; indeed, companies with egalitarian organizational structures encourage it. However, it is associated with vicarious moral licensing, and that should be managed.

When hiring leaders, organizations can take note of candidates who embrace servant or humble leadership styles — who may be particularly prone to closely identifying with team members — and look for balancing traits and values likely to reduce unethical behavior, such as a strong moral identity.15 Indeed, recent research indicates that after experiencing abuse from their boss, leaders with a strong moral identity are more likely to resist the temptation to then act abusively toward members of their own teams, thereby breaking the trickle-down cycle of abusive supervision.16 Similarly, when leaders with a strong moral identity do experience feelings of vicarious moral licensing, they may be more likely to resist justifying unethical behavior; they may instead engage in less harmful acts of deviance (for instance, taking more time than usual to respond to emails).

In organizations with egalitarian structures, where shared power and decision-making are the norm, leader development programs should explicitly acknowledge potential downsides that may be surprising to participants, like vicarious moral licensing. While training leaders to recognize feelings of entitlement that can occur in the wake of team citizenship, organizations can discourage them from using such feelings to justify unethical behavior at work. Prior research has shown that employees sometimes use moral licenses to justify less virtuous behavior at home.17 Clearly, deviance at home should not be encouraged, but leaders could be trained to channel any feelings of entitlement in ways that are healthy for them and their home lives, such as not working in the evening or on weekends.

Since citizenship behavior is incredibly valuable for companies, they want leaders who can inspire it. Needing to be mindful of vicarious moral licensing as a potential downside is actually a good problem to have; it means team members are going above and beyond. Organizations just need to recognize and manage the risks.