Research On The Effects Of Leader Punishment Behavior On Employee Deviant Behaviors

Employee deviant behavior is prevalent in the workplace.It has various forms and brings severe losses to the organization.Moreover,its harm is often difficult to predict,so it contains great risks.Therefore,how to curb workplace deviant behavior has become a pressing problem faced by the practical circle.To deal with employee deviant behavior,punishment as a negative incentive management means has been widely used in practice for a longtime.However,as a highly sensitive topic,punishment poses significant challenges to the practice circle and is also a controversial issue in the academic field.Although leader punishment will inevitably bring some negative effects,more and more studies believe that punishment has a positive effect on employees and organizations to a large extent,thus providing an essential basis for leaders to implement punishment.However,so far,it is unknown whether leader punishment can effectively inhibit and eliminate employee deviant behavior,and there is a lack of in-depth research.In the organizational context,some punishments can indeed inhibit employee deviant behavior.Still,a considerable part of punishments not only do not inhibit but stimulate deviant behavior,confusing organizational punishment practice:The punishment implemented to inhibit and eliminate deviant behavior leads to more deviant behavior.Given this practical confusion,this study aims to clarify the impact of different types of punishment(contingent and noncontingent punishment)on employee deviant behavior and the mediating and moderating mechanism in the influence process.This study used the literature analysis method to construct the theoretical model to distinguish the relevant concepts.Through the induction of pertinent literature at home and abroad,this study clarified the academic debate on the research of punishment effect,focused on the research literature on the impact of punishment on the disciplined subordinate,and clarified the foothold of this study based on literature review.Firstly,based on behavioral game theory,a game model of punishment and deviant behavior between leaders and employees was constructed.Then we carried out the evolutionary game analysis,and we deduce the basic hypothesis that contingent punishment and non-contingent punishment have opposite effects on deviant behavior,which provides an economic basis for the research on the relationship between leader punishment and employee deviant behavior,and we verify the two hypotheses through a scenario experiment,which provides a strong causal inference for this research model.On this basis,combined with fair heuristic theory and moral disengagement theory,this paper constructed the theoretical framework of the impact mechanism of leader punishment on workplace deviant behavior,and discusses the serial mediating mechanism of justice perception and moral disengagement between leader punishment and workplace deviant behavior,as well as the moderating mechanism of moral identity and ethical climate in the above serial mediation model,and put forward relevant theoretical assumptions.In the empirical analysis method,this study used the employee questionnaire survey.The questionnaire was designed with the maturity scales of English authoritative journals.Also,these scales have been validated and used by other scholars in the Chinese context.For data processing,the statistical software Statal6,Mplus8.3,and SPSS Statistics 26 including Hayes’s PROCESS extension tool were used for multivariate statistical analysis to test the relevant hypothesis about simple mediation effect,serial mediation effect,moderated mediation effect,and moderated serial mediation effect in this study.Based on the empirical study of enterprise employee samples,the following conclusions are obtained:(1)There is a serial mediation linking the two types of punishment(contingent punishment and noncontingent punishment)to deviant behavior via justice perceptions and moral disengagement.Specifically,contingent punishment has a positive impact on justice perception;Noncontingent punishment negatively affects justice perception.The justice perception has a negative impact on moral disengagement;moral disengagement has a positive impact on deviant behavior.Justice perception plays a mediating role between contingent punishment(or noncontingent punishment)and moral disengagement.Contingent punishment(noncontingent punishment)has a negative(positive)impact on deviant behavior through the mediating role of justice perception and moral disengagement.(2)Moral identity has a weakening moderating effect on the relationship between justice perception and moral disengagement.(3)Moral identity has a weakening moderating effect on the mediating role of justice perception between contingent punishment and moral disengagement.Also,it has a weakening moderating effect on the serial mediating role of justice perception and moral disengagement between contingent punishment and deviant behavior.(4)It is partially supported that moral identity has a weakening moderating effect on the mediating role of justice perception between noncontingent punishment and moral disengagement.Also,it is partially supported that moral identity has a weakening moderating effect on the serial mediating role of justice perception and moral disengagement between noncontingent punishment and deviant behavior.(5)Ethical climate has a weakening moderating effect on the relationship between moral disengagement and deviant behavior.(6)Ethical climate has a weakening moderating effect on the serial mediating role of justice perception and moral disengagement between contingent punishment(or noncontingent punishment)and deviant behavior.The three main contributions are as follows:(1)Previous scholars have insufficient research on the relationship between leader punishment behavior and employee negative behavior.This study explores the impact of leader punishment on employee deviant behavior and compares the different impacts of contingent punishment and noncontingent punishment on deviant behavior.Thus,our study expands the outcome of punishment,enriches the study of punishment effect,and provides new ideas and evidence for the long-term debate on the quality of punishment effect.(2)Previous studies explained the mechanism of punishment effect based on deterrence theory,reinforcement theory,social learning theory,and organizational justice theory.Our study builds an evolutionary strategy game model and derives the fundamental hypotheses about the relationship between leader contingent or noncontingent punishment and employee deviant behavior.We also combine fairness heuristic theory and moral disengagement theory to confirm the serial mediating mechanism of fairness perception and moral disengagement between leader contingent or noncontingent and employee deviant behavior,and provides a new theoretical perspective for the study of punishment in organizations.(3)Previous empirical studies on punishment seldom paid attention to the moderating effect of individual and organizational characteristics,especially lack of comprehensive consideration of individual and organizational factors.Based on the perspective of ethics,this study integrates moral identity at the individual level and ethical climate at the organizational level into the theoretical framework and comprehensively reveals the important boundary conditions of leader contingent or noncontingent punishment affecting employee deviant behavior.