The Role of Self-Interest in Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior: A Nomological Network Meta-Analysis

To date, the unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) literature has been guided by a prosocial perspective, which argues that people engage in UPB primarily to benefit the employers with whom they identify and have a positive social exchange. According to this perspective, employees who are characteristically self-interested are less likely to engage in UPB. However, recent evidence suggests self-interest may play a larger role in motivating UPB than originally theorized. To clarify this controversy, we offer two different, but not necessarily mutually exclusive, perspectives of UPB—one in which UPB is driven primarily by prosocial motives and one in which it is driven primarily by self-interest. We tested which of these accounts of UPB was more strongly supported by comparing UPB’s relationships with two nomological networks: one containing relatively prosocially motivated constructs and the other containing relatively self-interest-motivated constructs. Two of the eight hypotheses from the prosocial perspective were supported, while seven of the eight hypotheses from the self-interest perspective were supported. Additionally, the average absolute value of UPB’s correlations with prosocial perspective constructs was.09, while the comparable average correlation with self-interest perspective constructs was.33. Thus, the results favored the self-interest perspective. We discuss how these findings change our theoretical understanding of UPB by acknowledging both its prosocial and self-interest motivations, and we accordingly propose a revised definition for UPB that allows for both of these motivations. We also examined more broadly the relationship between UPB and other constructs to provide a comprehensive meta-analytic overview of this literature.