How Good Citizens Enable Bad Leaders
Leaders who take credit for their teams’ good deeds sometimes feel entitled to behave unethically.
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.
References (17)
1. R.F. Piccolo and J.A. Colquitt, “Transformational Leadership and Job Behaviors: The Mediating Role of Core Job Characteristics,” Academy of Management Journal 49, no. 2 (April 2006): 327-340.
2. P.M. Podsakoff, S.B. MacKenzie, J.B. Paine, et al., “Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: A Critical Review of the Theoretical and Empirical Literature and Suggestions for Future Research,” Journal of Management 26, no. 3 (January 2000): 513-563.
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Bharathiraja Ramachandrabose