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From Good Soldiers To Psychologically Entitled: Examining When And Why Citizenship Behavior Leads To Deviance

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The Academy of Management Journal

Published online on

Abstract

Research has consistently demonstrated that organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) produce a wide array of positive outcomes for employees and organizations. Recent work, however, suggests that employees often engage in OCBs not because they want to but because they feel they have to, and it is not clear if OCBs performed for external motives have the same positive effects on individuals and organizational functioning as do traditional OCBs. In this paper, we draw from self-determination and moral licensing theories to suggest a potential negative consequence of OCB. Specifically, we argue that when employees feel compelled to engage in OCB by external forces, they will subsequently feel psychologically entitled for having gone above and beyond the call of duty. Furthermore, these feelings of entitlement can act as moral credentials that psychologically free employees to engage in both interpersonal and organizational deviance. Data from two multi-source field studies and an online experiment provide support for these hypotheses. In addition, we demonstrate that OCB-generated feelings of entitlement transcend organizational boundaries and lead to deviance outside of the organization.