Analysisof Antecedent Factors Of Managerial Pro-social Rule Breaking

Pro-social behavior has attracted considerable research attention with the rise ofpositive organizational behavior over the last three decades. Contrary to the traditionalmanagement view of employees as self-interested performers, this literature hasidentified situations in which organization members engage in constructive, sociallydesirable behaviors that benefit coworkers or organization. Scholars has paid moreattentions to constructive organization behavior rather than destructive organizationbehavior. For example, Vardi and Weitz’s(2004) framework categorized organizationalmisbehavior (OMB) in to three types. And the OMB Type-O(organizational) whichbelong to constructive behaviors reflects misbehaviors that are primarily intended tobenefit the employing organization. Warren(2003) also arguedthat workplace deviancealso could be constructive, he named this type of workplace deviance as constructivedeviance.Morrison (2006) referred to this type of volitional rule breaking in the interest ofothers as pro-social rule breaking(PSRB).More specifically, she identified three differentcategories of PSRBthat are common in organizations, namely PSRB to (1) perform jobduties for the organizationmore efficiently,(2) help another employee with job-relatedduties, and (3) provide better customer service.She argued that when organizationalrules and pro-social behavior conflictedeach other, employees who had high pro-socialmotivation might break the rules of the organization to help other people andorganizations.I build the antecedent factors model of pro-social rule breaking by integratingprevious research results. The underlying theoretical model is consistent with Ajzen’smodel of The Planned Behavior. The model includes the following antecedents:self-regulatory, empathy, coworker behaviors, organizational structure characteristics(mechanical/organic), job autonomy and self-efficacy. Then measurement scales foreach variable toprepare a questionnaire for middle managers. Through a survey of78middle managers in8company and208MBA students,231valid questionnaires arecollected. In order to test the impact of various factors on the pro-social rule breaking, confirmatory factor analysis, descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and regressionanalysisare used in this dissertation to verify the theoretical hypotheses.The results show that empathy and coworkers behavior have positive effecton threetypes of pro-social rule breaking. Job autonomy has a positive effect on the PSRB forcoworkers and PSRB for customers, the relation between PSRB for efficiency andautonomyis not be supported, there is no significant correlation between PSRBandself-efficacy, self-regulatory and organizational structure characteristics.At the endof this dissertation, the author discusses the results, provides enterprises with somepractical suggestions, points out the limitation of this study and future researchdirections.