| Follow or break the rules? Neither approach seems infallible because the rules are not always correct and the rule breaking behaviors may be "in good faith".Pro-social rule breaking is such a kind of good-faith violation with altruistic motives,which refers to organizational members intentionally violate the formal rules of the organization in order to improve the efficiency of the organization or to help colleagues or customers.Modern organizations and individuals are in an era of information explosion in which the environment is changing drastically."Change" is the only constant theme,but it seems difficult for the institutional rules born for the purpose of maintaining stability to "advance with the times".Organizational members often have to make a difficult choice between following the organizational rules in order to maintain the authority of the organizational system and violating the rules in order to promote the interests of the organization and related stakeholders.To resolve this decision-making dilemma,more and more organizational members have adopted the strategy of pro-social rule breaking in order to achieve their goals.A research in recent years shows that the proportion of pro-social rule breaking has reached as high as 80%.However,despite the good intentions,the punishment from the organization or the wrong imitation by the others will cause unpredictable harm to the doer and organization due to that the violation behaviors are easy to be misunderstood.How to not only protect employees' initiative but also prevent the negative impact of violations on organization and individuals? How to guide the pro-social rule breaking to play a positive role in promoting the output of group and individual performance?This widespread organizational phenomenon has become an urgent problem to be solved in organizational management.This widespread organizational phenomenon has posed a challenge to management research and practice.By combing through the existing domestic and foreign literatures on pro-social rule breaking,we find that the research on the consequences of pro-social rule breaking are relatively scarce,prior researchers pay attention to individual level only and the research methods are slightly single.In order to make up for the deficiencies of existing research,this article systematically conducts four studies around the antecedents and consequences of pro-social rule breaking from the perspective of multi-party interaction between employees and colleagues,or leaders,or working teams.First,from the perspective of interpersonal interaction and based on the theory of“sensitivity about being the target of a threatening upward comparison”,this paper constructs a moderated mediation model that reflects the relationship between relative supervisor?subordinate guanxi and pro-social rule breaking of employees to explore the influence of "relative quantity" of guanxi on pro-social rule breaking of employees under the unbalanced pattern of guanxi of the team.Study 1 systematically reveals the mechanism and influence process of relative supervisor?subordinate guanxi on the employees' pro-social rule breaking.Through the regression analysis of data collected at different time points from 200 employees in two companies in Shanghai,we found that relative supervisor?subordinate guanxi generated by social comparison will cause the compared employee's perception of being envied.Pro-social rule breaking is the interaction strategy for the employee to eliminate feeling envied.The employee's perspective taking will strengthen the intention of pro-social rule breaking.The results show that the clients with more perspective taking will resolve potential threats through implementing pro-social rule breaking for fear of being envied.Therefore,leaders should understand the inner emotional mechanism of employees' pro-social rule breaking and adopt appropriate management strategies to guide them,so as to promote harmony in the workplace.Second,on the basis of the empirical analysis of Study 1 and combining the inconsistent conclusions in previous studies,this article adopts the method of fuzzy sets qualitative comparative analysis to integrate multiple predictors from the perspective of configuration and considers the influence of multiple logical combinations of antecedents,including individual characteristics(gender),individual ability(perspective taking),individual perception(being envied),individual factor within the team(relative supervisor?subordinate guanxi)and team leadership(ethical leadership),on pro-social rule breaking.Through the method of fuzzy sets qualitative comparative analysis,the current paper indicates that five paths of antecedent combination can effectively cause employees' behavior of pro-social rule breaking,thus providing a variety of options for leaders to manage employees' behavior.Third,integrating the perspective of leader initiative and employee response,based on self-verification theory and normative conflict model,the current study constructs a dual-path moderated mediation model to reveal the relationship between leader's pro-social rule breaking and employee's upward voice.With the analysis on283 leader-employee dyadic matching data collected from a large hotel chain in China,the empirical results show that leaders who have implemented pro-social rule breaking tend to seek feedback from subordinates rather than superiors for the purpose of self-verification,thus arouse subordinates' voice behaviors in the process of communication.Moral courage plays a negative moderate role in the aforementioned relationship.In addition,the leader behaviors give rise to the subordinate's perception of normative conflict.In order to eliminate the cognitive dissonance caused by the sense of conflict,subordinates will solve it in a positive form of advice when the organization has a good reputation.The conclusion of Study3 brings useful management enlightenment to leaders who implement pro-social rule breaking.That is,leaders can stimulate employees' voice and will not let themselves and their subordinates fall into a dilemma(compliance or violation)if the leaders take appropriately measures.Fourth,starting from the interaction analysis between members and team,this paper systematically reveals the mechanism and influence process of team pro-social rule breaking on team creative performance based on the theory of information processing,and discuss the impact of pro-social rule breaking on team cognition and output when it aggregates from individual behavior to team phenomenon.Analysis of382 data from two subsidiaries of a large manufacturing enterprise shows that in the learning-oriented atmosphere team pro-social rule breaking can effectively cause team reflexivity which in turn can promote team creative performance.The results show that members of learning organizations are better able to analyze the nature of pro-social rule breaking and catch something that is conducive to the development of the organization under the surface of violation,so as to improve organizational innovation.Therefore,the construction of learning teams should be an important management responsibility of every manager.The current study has the following important significance in promoting the development of theory.Firstly,by combining multiple regression analysis and fuzzy sets qualitative comparative analysis,this study explores the trigger mechanism of employees' pro-social rule breaking in the pattern of relative guanxi and finds the relationship between individual negative emotions and pro-social rule breaking,which opens the "black box" between the "relative quantity" resulting from the comparison and pro-social rule breaking and advances the research on the antecedents of pro-social rule breaking;we also break through the limitations of existing mainstream quantitative research by introducing the configuration method of fuzzy sets qualitative comparative analysis,which broadens the thinking and methodology of the research on the antecedents of pro-social rule breaking.Secondly,this paper explores the influence mechanism of leaders' pro-social rule breaking on employees' positive behaviors from the two paths of leaders feedback seeking and employees actively responding to normative conflicts,which establishes a connection between leaders' pro-social rule breaking and employees' positive behaviors;the introduction of the self-verification perspective breaks the limitation in existing concepts and methods that set pro-social rule breakers as only negatively accepter of the results;in addition,we reveal the mechanism for employees to actively respond to the moral dilemma caused by leaders' pro-social rule breaking from the perspective of employees' norm conflict perception,all of which make up for the lack of research on the consequences and influence mechanism of pro-social rule breaking.Thirdly,focusing on the interaction between individuals and team,this paper analyzes how individual pro-social rule breaking rise to the team phenomenon and defines the construct of team pro-social rule breaking;we also explore the influence mechanism of team pro-social rule breaking on team output,filling the blank of the correlative research,all of which further expand the perspective and level of research on pro-social rule breaking and contribute to the promotion of systematic research on pro-social rule breaking from the perspective of multi-level interaction between individuals,teams,and organizations.Moreover,the findings of this paper also bring some useful enlightenment to the organizational management practice.Due to the altruistic nature of pro-social rule breaking,managers should have a deep understanding of the true motives behind the behaviors rather than overemphasize its violations.Managers should take appropriate management measures to guide the positive side of pro-social rule breaking while suppressing its possible negative side on the basis of fully mastering the mechanism of its occurrence and influence,so as to protect the employees' willingness to take risks for the interests of the organization and others,and maintain the authority and stability of reasonable rules,ultimately ensuring the improvement of organizational performance and creative development.Finally,we summarize the limitations of this research and look forward to the future research directions. |
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