The Influence Mechanism Of Pay For Performance On Employee Unethical Behavior

Nowadays,unethical behavior has become more and more common in the workplace,and this has become a pressing problem that needs to be solved by modern organizations.Unethical behavior is defined as any organizational member action that violates widely accepted(societal)moral norms(Kaptein,2008)[1].Unethical behavior within organizations may not only lead to devastating effects,such as decreasing member's helping behavior and positive experiences,but also threaten the reputation,financial performance and even the continuity of business organizations.Unethical behavior has generated widespread interests in academic circles and business organizations(Trevino et al.,2006;Kish-Gephart et al.,2010)[2][3].Like other behaviors,unethical behavior won't naturally occur unless there is stimulus of external factors and ethical decisions related to the stimulus.According to the review of literature,the antecedents of unethical behavior noted by recent researches including individual characteristics,moral issue characteristics and organizational environment characteristics.Researchers focusing on organizational environment mainly conduct their researches on ethical climate and styles of supervisors,only few researches pay attention to the policy of organization.Organizational policy is the code of conduct for all members to obey and it is also the basic norm of the organization.Organizational policy defines the rights and obligations of each member in order to provide guidance for their behaviors.Pay-for-performance has become the mainstream payment method worldwide(Du,2009;Gerhart et al.,2009)[4][5],ts effects on the behaviors of employees need to be valued as well.Based on this situation,we use Self-Regulation Theory as the foundation,pay-for-performance as the mediating variable,perceived organizational support and moral identity as the moderating variables,to investigate the influence of pay-for-performance on employees' unethical behavior as well as its mechanism and contextual restricts.We collected 328 questionnaires from different organizations,used SPSS 23.0 and AMOS 23.0 software to analyze data,and drew the following conclusions:(1)pay-for-performance positively influence employees'unethical behavior;(2)workplace anxiety mediated the relationship between pay-for-performance and employees' unethical behavior;(3)perceived organizational support moderated the relationship between pay-for-performance and workplace anxiety such that the weaker the perceived organizational support,the stronger the positive relationship between pay-for-performance and workplace anxiety.The main contributions of this study are:(1)this study explores the "dark side" of pay-for-performance,verifies the impact of pay-for-performance on employees'unethical behavior and completes researches on pay-for-performance;(2)it introduces self-regulatory perspective to reveal the psychological mechanism of how pay-for-performance affects employees' unethical behavior;(3)based on self-regulation theory,this study expands researches on the contextual factors related to the effect of pay-for-performance;(4)this study investigates how pay-for-performance system affects employees' unethical behavior,which enriches researches on unethical behavior.