1. Introduction
With rapid economic growth, people experience positive changes brought about by the business society to their lives but also the negative news of corporate moral deficiency events that can damage the external reputation of the organization (e.g., Uber, Japan steel, Volkswagen and Melamine). However, some are still hidden inside the organization [
1]. The problem of corporate ethics has become a common phenomenon and threatens the sustainable development of enterprises, so corporate moral crisis has attracted much attention. Unethical behavior is generally described as any behavior that is “illegally or morally unacceptable in the wider society” [
2], and it can happen to anyone in the organization, from the managed to the manager.
Some scholars believe that employees violate social values, moral standards and laws not for self-seeking or revenge but for the organization’s and its members’ interests; such altruistic unethical behavior is called unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) [
3,
4]. However, the exposure of unethical behavior will not only deteriorate the partnership between the company and other stakeholders but also harm the business’s external reputation. As a result, employees who behave unethically have been a long-standing subject of research in management and organizations. Moreover, the existing literature has found that both positive reciprocity and organizational identity promote UPB [
5]. Therefore, the academic community has begun to reflect on the reasons why employees engage in unethical activities that are usually viewed as positive management measures, employee attitudes or behaviors [
6].
Alternatively, as the core of an enterprise’s core competitiveness, employees are the soul and key resources of the enterprise’s foothold and development. With the advancement of globalization, the increasingly open labor market liberalization, employees’ employment ability for the negotiations among employees and organizational relationships, dramatic changes have taken place in organization in the role of employee career management by the controller into supporters; this presents significant challenges for organizations to retain professional employees. Therefore, idiosyncratic deals (I-deals) that adapt to the needs of employee and organization employment negotiation emerge at the right moment and become a new topic in the field of employee and organization relationship research [
7]. In this context, this paper studies the I-deals for suspected organizations on the influence of unethical behavior; however, the existing research mainly from the individual character, moral case characteristics and the point of view of leadership behavior, to employees’ organizational wrongdoing to explain the connection between the two studies, is still lacking from the viewpoint of the relationship between the employee and the organization as well as the potential impact. To address these issues, we examine the mediatory functions of the Psychological contract (PC) and job satisfaction (JS) to explain the complex relationship between I-deals and pro-organizational unethical behavior.
Firstly, PC refers to “employees perceive each other’s responsibilities in the employment contract” [
8]. When employees and organizations perceive cognitive differences in the PC, they will prompt each other to sign personalized contracts. However, employees maybe conduct unethical behaviors in order to achieve high performance goals matching personalized contracts [
7]. Secondly, JS of employees is impacted in varying degrees by various I-deal kinds [
9]. Employees receive more benefits from the organization the higher the JS. Therefore, on the one hand, the organization is more eager to obtain the employee’s return when it satisfied the needs of the employees [
10,
11], and, on the other hand, employees may be more focused on how to repay the benefits the organization brings to them than on their own ethical behavior [
4]. Career progress, personal growth and psychological safety are often the basis of a PC, which causes high commitment of some employees to the organization. On this basis, employees who obtain I-deals are likely to have a higher sense of satisfaction and then take some immoral actions in return for the organization. Therefore, I-deals also indirectly generate UPB through the PC-JS pathway. In addition, whether the organization can dynamically change and adapt to the environment is essential to the long-term growth of the organization. If the employees with idiosyncratic deals cannot adapt to the speed of environmental changes, the organization may cancel the I-deals, and, in this case, the employees are likely to carry out immoral behaviors. Therefore, to comprehend the mechanisms underlying the effects of I-deals on UPB better, this study further examined the regulating function of environmental turbulence (ET).
This paper explores four issues with the use of social exchange theory and social cognitive theory. The first is the relationship between I-deals and UPB. Secondly, the mediating role of PC and JS in the relationship is discussed. Thirdly, in this study investigation, the chain mediating effect of PC and JS on the relationship between I-deals and UPB is explored. Finally, the moderating influence on ET on the relationship between I-deals and pro-organizational unethical behavior is tested.
5. Discussion
Based on social exchange theory and social cognitive theory, this paper discusses the influence of I-deals on employees’ UPB. The results of this study confirm that I-deals had a significant effect on building the PC and increasing JS and contribute to the occurrence of UPB. The PC and JS mediated the relationship between I-deals and UPB. ET positively moderated the relationship between I-deals and employees’ UPB.
5.1. Theoretical Contribution and Practical Implication
The following are theoretical developments and influences of this study.
First, this study successfully links I-deals with UPB, revealing that employees with I-deals generate unethical behaviors in order to maintain corporate image and improve corporate interests. Previous scholarly research focused more on the positive aspects of the impact of social exchange, such as the role of I-deals in promoting job performance, organizational citizenship behavior and employees’ innovation behavior [
62,
63,
64], and disregard the negative effects of social exchange. This study found that employees with I-deals would perform unethical behavior in order to achieve matching high-performance goals, which may be beneficial to the enterprise in the short term but will eventually cause serious damage to the enterprise’s market reputation and development prospects [
22]. This has an enlightening effect on the theoretical research of perfecting the I-deals and the management practice of the targeted intervention of employees’ UPB. It is hoped that the academic circle will further consider and explore the moral impact of favorable attitudes and behaviors to enterprises, provide more abundant and powerful theoretical results and promote enterprises to prevent unethical behaviors more effectively.
Second, as a result of the literature review, most of the preceding studies on employees’ UPB were conducted in terms of individual characteristics [
4,
65] or relationships [
21,
66]; however, not much attention has been paid to the ways in which strategic human resource management practices influence employees’ UPB. Strategic human resource management is the most direct and intimate source of contact between companies and their employees, so UPB by employees often occurs in specific management practices at the corporate level. Solutions implemented by organizations and managers can inhibit employees’ unethical behavior but at the same time can induce employees’ UPB. Therefore, this study discusses how unusual and critical transaction systems can induce unethical behavior for the benefit of the organization by providing more benefits to employees. In addition, it responded to the previously studied method of preventing UPB by employees and further studied the factors that induce UPB by employees.
Then, this study explains the intrinsic mechanism of I-deals and employees’ UPB based on the social exchange theory from the perspective of the reciprocity principle, proposing the mediating variables of I-deals affecting employees’ UPB: PC and JS. It was also found that employees who entered into I-deals committed beneficial but UPB in order to establish and maintain the PC in return for the organization. The “employee-centered” idiosyncratic work system that is designed not only facilitates the achievement of organizational goals but also helps employees to achieve their own development goals and to realize the common good and strengthens the PC between employees and the organization. At the same time, the more benefits employees receive from the organization, the higher their JS; employees may be more focused on how to repay the benefits of the organization than whether their behavior is ethical. With reference to previous research by scholars, the mediating mechanism of UPB has been explained using social exchange theory [
4,
67], and no research has tested the mediating role of the PC and JS in this process as well as the chain mediating role. So, this research contributes by selecting two variables that have not received much attention in the past but have the potential to build long-term mutually beneficial relationships with companies, namely the PC and JS, uncover the mechanism of I-deals’ influence on employee’s UPB and retest the explanation of social exchange theory for UPB.
Lastly, this study investigates ET as a moderating variable, affecting the happening of unethical pro-organization behaviors. Based on social exchange theory, UPB may occur due to individual or environmental factors. Thus, this study incorporated ET as a research framework for the impact of I-deals on employees’ UPB and considered the combination of personal and environmental factors that affect the occurrence of employees’ unethical behavior. The findings of this study can be helpful to obtain a more detailed picture of the factors influencing pro-organizational behavior; it also provides theoretical suggestions for corporate management of such behaviors. Therefore, companies should strengthen the importance of ethical goals in the face of competition and at the same time strengthen the ethical management system within the company to encourage ethical leadership behavior [
68], strengthen employees’ moral awareness and call on employees to use ethical practices to achieve high-performance goals that match their I-deals to achieve the sustainable development of the companies.
5.2. Limitations and Future Research
This research has the following limitations and needs to be supplemented through further study. First of all, this research collected data from different perspectives but still has a problem that causal conclusions cannot be drawn. In the cause of improving this, it is necessary to provide an experimental method for later causality verification. Secondly, the PC and JS, and the study has limitations. In order to have a more systematic and comprehensive understanding of the UPB induced by employees with I-deals in terms of social cognitive variables, the relationship between the two can be further explored in the future by using the regulatory focus theory as the basis for variables such as moral disengagement or moral identity. Furthermore, this research explored the relationship between I-deals and UPB based on social cognitive theory, and future research could further explore the effect of various I-deal kinds on employees’ UPB. Finally, this study thinks that the phenomenon of I-deals that will bring about UPB should be common in business society; data were only collected from the China context. In the future, it is necessary to collect and verify data from each country, and research on unethical behavior and UPB will be conducted by presenting variables such as culture.