From Helping Hands to Harmful Acts: When and How Employee Volunteering Promotes Workplace Deviance

This study examines how the laudable behavior of employee volunteering can lead to deviant workplace behavior. We draw on the moral licensing and organizational justice literatures to propose that the relationship between employee volunteering and workplace deviance is serially mediated by moral license (moral credits and moral credentials) and psychological entitlement. Results from 2 multiwave survey studies of full-time employees from a variety of organizations and industries confirm that moral credits and psychological entitlement serially mediate this relationship, although the proposed mediating role of moral credentials was not supported. Organizational justice moderates the impact of psychological entitlement on workplace deviance; the indirect relationship between employee volunteering and workplace deviance weakens when perceptions of organizational justice are high. This study demonstrates a potential dark side to employee volunteering and also contributes to the moral licensing and behavioral ethics literatures.