Embedded and Unethical: Why and When Job Embeddedness Facilitates Unethical Behavior

Job embeddedness—the organizational and community forces that anchor employees in their jobs—consistently predicts a wide array of positive outcomes for both individuals and organizations. Still, we question whether high job embeddedness always has normatively desirable effects. Drawing on theories of social identity and organizational climate, we develop a model of why and when embeddedness can motivate unethical behavior. Embedded employees strongly identify with their organization, and thus, we reasoned, are highly motivated to comply with their organization’s social norms. This can inspire embedded individuals to further their organization’s cause through unethical behavior. This is especially likely if they are embedded in a normative climate that privileges organizational interests above all else (i.e., a local egoism climate). We support this model across multiple organizational contexts and empirical methods. We first examined members of terrorist organizations (NTotal = 18,154), finding embeddedness to predict their support for a particularly destructive form of unethical behavior: the use of extreme violence to achieve organizational objectives. We then tested our full theoretical model in a series of preregistered experiments among US employees (NTotal = 5,476). We found that embeddedness causes unethical behavior, and this effect is mediated by norm compliance—but only in a local egoism climate. Encouragingly, more principled climates constrained the deleterious effect of embeddedness by cutting off the relationship between embedded employees’ motivation to comply with norms and their unethical behavior. Collectively, this work advances job embeddedness theory and suggests a means to harness its benefits while curtailing its costs.