Doing Good to Be (Subtly) Bad: A Moral Licensing View on the Relations Between Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Instigated Incivility

ABSTRACTThe present research examines the relations between OCB and interpersonal mistreatment from the lens of the Moral Balance Model, wherein good deeds provide moral credits that enable immoral behavior. We suggest that OCB may license engagement in morally equivalent forms of interpersonal mistreatment, such as instigated incivility, and not more immoral forms of mistreatment, such as interpersonally targeted counterproductive work behavior (CWB-I). Moreover, we posit that the licensing effects of OCB likely occur quickly, such as across a typical work week. Across two studies (NStudy 1 = 209, NStudy 2 = 192), we largely find support for our propositions. In our first study, using a rating task, we find that certain forms of instigated incivility are more theoretically suited for tests of OCB-related moral licensing when compared to CWB-I. Then, in our second study using a within-week time-lagged sample of service employees, we find that OCB at the beginning of the week relates to two kinds of instigated incivility (i.e. privacy invasion and exclusionary behavior) at the end of the week through moral credits gained at the middle of the week. As anticipated, these moral credits did not license engagement in CWB-I. Implications for research and practice are discussed. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 It is important to note that moral credits do not change the interpretation of immoral behavior, and employees who "purchase" the right to immoral acts via moral credits would still view their behavior as immoral – though acceptable (Miller & Effron, Citation2010).2 It should be noted that portions of this dataset have been published; the published studies, however, only share overlap with our outcome variables (i.e., Time 4, instigated incivility). OCB, CWB-I, and moral credits were not utilized in the published studies, and the fundamental goals differ between these works. Thus, we feel this study is distinct, despite an overlap in outcomes.3 Though there is a debate on the appropriateness of item parcels (Marsh et al., Citation2013), research has suggested that they have value in samples comparable to ours in size (Rioux et al., Citation2020). Recent organizational research on workplace mistreatment has employed methods similar to ours (e.g., Park et al., Citation2022).