| Employees of organizations that have articulated core shared values expect one another to adhere to the values (O'Reilly & Chatman,1996). However, employees may find it difficult both to "walk the talk" of their employers and to be seen by other employees as "walking the talk," because values are broad and abstract constructs with many possible interpretations (Cha & Edmondson, 2003). Despite the importance of organizational values as part of the psychological contract, little is known about when employees perceive other employees to be violating organizational values, when employees attribute a perceived value breach to the actor's hypocrisy (or lack of underlying commitment to the values), and how this attribution affects organizational outcomes. This dissertation develops a theoretical model of antecedents and outcomes of hypocrisy attribution, integrating research on organizational values, psychological contracts, behavioral integrity, leadership, and social cognition. Two experimental studies, testing portions of the model, found an "inoculation effect" for leaders in a strong values context, whose value breaches were attributed less strongly to the actor's hypocrisy than were the breaches of either non-leaders in a strong values context or leaders in a weak values context, by subjects in the role of employees. Hypocrisy attribution caused subjects to experience feelings of violation; tarnished their view of the actor's professional image along three emergent dimensions of perceived soundness, perceived safeness, and perceived charisma; and led subjects to attribute each subsequent value breach even more strongly to the actor's hypocrisy. |
