The Effect Of Employee Work Connectivity Behavior After-Hours On Counterproductive Work Behavior:A Moral Licensing Theory Perspective

In the current Internet era,it has become a common phenomenon for employees to use communication tools to deal with work during non-working hours.Existing research mainly from the perspective of resources and work-family border to explore the potential impact of work connectivity behavior after-hours on employee’s work and life,while there are few studies on how work connectivity behavior after-hours affects employees’ specific work behavior,especially counterproductive work behavior.Therefore,based on moral licensing theory,we attempt to explore the influence of work connectivity behavior after-hours on employee counterproductive work behavior,and the role of moral credit and perceived leader’s after-hours electronic communication expectations(AECE)in this process.To test the hypotheses in our model,this study takes the employees with the fixed commuting time as the research objects and collects questionnaire data using a multi-point and multi-source leader-employee pairing method.Finally,correlation analysis and hierarchical regression analysis were conducted on 341 pairs of employee-subordinate matching questionnaires.The results show that:1.Work connectivity behavior after-hours positively affects their moral credit;2.Work connectivity behavior after-hours through moral credit for the employee’s counterproductive work behavior has significant indirect positive effect.3.Perceived leader’s AECE plays a positive moderating role in the relationship between work connectivity behavior after-hours and counterproductive work behavior: Compared with employees who perceived low leader’s AECE,when employees perceived high leader’s AECE,employees’ work connectivity behavior afterhours generated more moral credits and were more likely to engage in counterproductive behavior later.The results of this study not only theoretically expand the research perspective of work connectivity behavior after-hours,but also enrich the research of moral licensing in the field of organization management to some extent,and remind leaders to manage work connectivity behavior after-hours in a proper way,and strengthen the control and intervention of its negative effects,which has certain reference significance for organization management practice.