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Moral disengagement was initially conceptualized as a process through which people reconstrue unethical behaviors, with the effect of deactivating self-sanctions and thereby clearing the way for ethical transgressions. Our article challenges how researchers now conceptualize moral disengagement. The current literature is overly liberal, in that it mixes two related but distinct constructs—process moral disengagement and the propensity to morally disengage—creating ambiguity in the findings. It is overly conservative, as it adopts a challengeable classification scheme of \"four points in moral self-regulation\" and perpetuates defining moral disengagement via a set of eight psychological mechanisms, narrowing our understanding of the phenomenon. To address these problems, we propose to define process moral disengagement intensionally (specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for correct application of the term) as intrapsychic cognitive reasoning processes through which people selectively reconstrue a moral judgment \"behavior by actor A is morally wrong\" and shift it toward becoming \"behavior is not morally wrong\" or \"actor A is not responsible for behavior B.\" This definition achieves disambiguation and increased concept clarity. We leverage the definition to motivate a classification scheme for psychological mechanisms of moral disengagement along two dimensions—reconstruing morality and reconstruing agency—and to initiate an open inventory of psychological mechanisms that specify how process moral disengagement operates.

Archival research reports that managers often use the FIN 48 uncertain tax liability accrual to manage earnings. To assess solutions to this problem, we deconstruct the ethical and psychological reasoning that leads to FIN 48 opportunistic behavior. Hence, we employ a survey of seasoned accounting managers to assess the influences of cynicism, two measures of moral disengagement, and pressure from a CFO on the propensity to engage in FIN 48 earnings management. Specifically, we manipulate the influence of the study scenario supervisory CFO as either a latent bully or a transformational leader. While the CFO bully main effect condition enhances FIN 48 earnings management, the CFO transformational leader condition interacts with less cynical accounting managers to reduce FIN 48 earnings management. We also find that both dispositional trait and situational state moral disengagement factors independently mediate the relationship between the cynicism model antecedent and FIN 48 earnings management. Collectively, study findings provide implications for both theory and practice.

We explored the effect of self-serving leadership on employees' helping behavior, focusing on the mediating role of moral disengagement and the moderating role of prosocial motivation. We recruited employees and direct supervisors of six companies in China, and analyzed data from 295 participants using structural equation modeling and hierarchical regression. Self-serving leadership had a significant negative impact on employees' helping behavior, and moral disengagement mediated the relationship between self-serving leadership and employees' helping behavior. Further, prosocial motivation moderated this relationship, that is, the stronger (vs. weaker) was the prosocial motivation of employees, the weaker (vs. stronger) was the effect of self-serving leadership on employees' helping behavior.

The current research explored the predictive power of an adapted version of the Moral Disengagement Scale, focused exclusively on online behaviors, along with age, relationship length and type (i.e., close or long-distance), Facebook addiction, and relationship satisfaction. Our sample consisted of 111 young heterosexual Romanian women aged 18 to 36 (M = 20.64, SD = 3.27). Hierarchical regression analysis suggested that the most important predictor of social media infidelity was Facebook addiction. None of the other considered predictors were significant in our final prediction model. However, a significant negative association emerged between social media infidelity and relationship satisfaction, suggesting that low relationship satisfaction might be a fertile ground for infidelity and social media addiction. Our model accounted for 18.3% of the variance in women's social media infidelity. Results are discussed considering self-justification mechanisms and self-serving attributions to infidelity.

Originally conceptualized by Bandura (Person Soc Psychol Rev 3:193-209, 1999) as the process of cognitive restructuring that allows individuals to disassociate with their internal moral standards and behave unethically without feeling distress, moral disengagement has attracted the attention of management researchers in recent years. An increasing body of research has examined the factors which lead people to morally disengage and its related outcomes in the workplace. However, the conceptualization of moral disengagement, how it should be measured, the manner in which it develops, and its influence on work outcomes are areas of continued debate among researchers. In this article, we undertake a systematic review of research on moral disengagement in the workplace and develop a comprehensive research agenda that highlights opportunities for theoretical and empirical advancement of the literature.

Studies of demand-side populism with a focus on attitudinal and behavioral factors are becoming more popular, but only a few have explored the phenomenon's psychological determinants. We tackle the lack of conversation between populism scholars and political psychologists and test the impact of conspiracy beliefs, moral disengagement, need for cognition, and belief in simple solutions on populist attitudes. We use the most widespread ideational definition in an attempt to bring clarity to demand-side populism, as the literature often conflates the concept of populism with adjacent ideological and psychological factors. We analyze representative samples from two very different countries (Italy and Turkey) to test our hypotheses. We use two of the most oftenused measures of populist attitudes and also explore populism's individual building blocks: people-centrism, antielitism, and a Manichean worldview. We consistently find conspiracy beliefs (and our control variable of institutional trust) as primary sources of populist attitudes, whereas the impact of the other psychological factors is more dependent on context and operationalization. Our article calls for more conceptual clarity, careful theorization, and more work on the refinement of available survey measures. We also highlight the importance of national contexts and the dangers of generalization based on individual country studies.

In this research, we examine the relationship between employee psychological entitlement (PE) and employee willingness to engage in unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB). We hypothesize that a high level of PE—the belief that one should receive desirable treatment irrespective of whether it is deserved—will increase the prevalence of this particular type of unethical behavior. We argue that, driven by self-interest and the desire to look good in the eyes of others, highly entitled employees may be more willing to engage in UPB when their personal goals are aligned with those of their organizations. Support for this proposition was found in Study 1, which demonstrates that organizational identification accentuates the link between PE and the willingness to engage in UPB. Study 2 builds on these findings by examining a number of mediating variables that shed light on why PE leads to a greater willingness among employees to engage in UPB. Furthermore, we explored the differential effects of PE on UPB compared to counterproductive work behavior (CWB). We found support for our moderated mediation model, which shows that status striving and moral disengagement fully mediate the link between PE and UPB. PE was also linked to CWB and was fully mediated by perceptions of organizational justice and moral disengagement.

Recent research has uncovered the dark side of creativity by finding that creative individuals are more likely to engage in unethical behavior. However, we argue that not all creative individuals make trouble. Using moral self-regulation theory as our overarching theoretical framework, we examine individuals' moral identity as a boundary condition and moral disengagement as a mediating mechanism to explain when and how individual creativity is associated with workplace deviant behavior. We conducted two field studies using multi-source data to test our hypotheses. In Study 1, the results indicated that creativity positively predicted moral disengagement for those low in moral identity. In Study 2 with multi-wave data, we replicated the finding that moral identity moderated the effect of creativity on moral disengagement in Study 1 and further revealed that moral disengagement mediated the interactive effects of creativity and moral identity on workplace deviant behavior. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.

Prior research on citizenship behavior (CB) has mainly focused on its voluntary side—organizational citizenship behavior. Unfortunately, although compulsory behavior is a global organizational phenomenon, the involuntary side of CB—compulsory citizenship behavior (CCB), defined as employees' involuntary engagement in extra-role work activities that are beneficial to the organization (Vigoda-Gadot in J Theory Soc Behav 36(1): 77-93, 2006)—has long been neglected and very little is known about its potential negative consequences. Particularly, research on CCB–counterproductive work behavior (CWB) association is still in its nascent stage. Therefore, drawing on moral disengagement (MD) theory and social exchange theory, we firstly attempt to systematically investigate how and when CCB leads to CWB. Specifically, we see employee silence as a critical form of passive CWB and propose a moderated mediation model. In the model, CCB predicts silence through MD—a set of cognitive mechanisms that deactivate moral self-regulatory processes (Bandura in Social foundations of thought and action: a social cognitive theory, Prentice Hall, Englewood 1986), with the Chinese culture-specific concept of supervisor-subordinate guanxi (s-s guanxi), which captures the supervisor-subordinate non-work-related personal ties, acting as the contextual condition. Two-wave data collected from a sample of 293 employees in 17 manufacturing firms in China supported our hypotheses. The results revealed that the more employees experienced compulsory feelings caused by CCB, the more they morally disengaged and, in turn, resorted to avoidant or passive responses (i.e., silence) as a coping strategy. Further, s-s guanxi serves as a reverse moderator in that high s-s guanxi mitigates the destructive impact of CCB, makes employees less inclined to morally disengage, and thereby largely prevents them from practicing workplace silence behavior. Implications for theory and intervention strategies for practice are discussed. We also propose several promising avenues for future research.

In business ethics research, little is known about why and how employees engage in unethical behavior, especially unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) and unethical pro-family behavior (UPFB). Based on cognitive-affective personality system theory and conservation of resources theory, this study aims to explore the mechanisms underlying the effects of workplace bullying, as a negative event, on UPB (Study 1) and UPFB (Study 2). In Study 1, workplace bullying negatively correlated with UPB where emotional exhaustion and organization-oriented moral disengagement played chain-mediating roles in this relationship. In Study 2, workplace bullying positively correlated with UPFB where emotional exhaustion and family-oriented moral disengagement played chain-mediating roles in the relationship. In both studies, perceived forgiveness climate, as a conditional factor, was found to weaken the positive impact of workplace bullying on both emotional exhaustion and the chain-mediating effect of emotional exhaustion and moral disengagement in the relationship between workplace bullying and UPB/UPFB. Overall, this study explains why, how, and when employees exhibit UPB and UPFB. The implications for theory and practices that could enable organizations to reduce employees’ unethical behavior are discussed.