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Exploring the Antecedents of Unethical Pro-organizational Behavior (UPB): A Meta-Analysis

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Abstract

Scholars have paid so much academic attention to UPB in the past decade. However, there is lacking a quantitative review to uncover the relationship between UPB and its antecedents. To address this, we make a meta-analytic review about UPB. Specifically, we propose a theoretical framework of antecedents of UPB and test it using meta-analysis technology (k = 67, n = 20,957). We found moral disengagement, organizational identification, identification with supervisors, leader UPB, ethical judgments, psychological entitlement, transformational leadership, and job satisfaction are positively related to UPB. Moral identity and taking responsibility are negatively related to UPB. Besides, ethical leadership, abusive supervision, and authoritarian leadership have double-edged sword effects on UPB. For ethical leadership, it increases UPB via LMX, on the other hand, it decreases UPB via moral disengagement. For abusive supervision and authoritarian leadership, they increase UPB via moral disengagement and decrease UPB via LMX meanwhile. We discuss the results of the current meta-analysis and put some future research directions.

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Data Availability

This is a meta-analytical review, so we do not have the original data.

Code Availability

The detailed coding information was shown in the supplemental material.

References

*Coding information and papers included in the current meta-analysis are shown in the supplemental materials.

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Funding

This research was supported by The Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72272147, 71802015).

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

YL: Hypotheses, Method, Results. KZ: Introduction, Discussion, Language revision. ZW: Coding, Hypotheses. FH: Coding, Hypotheses.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kai Zhao.

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Conflict of interest

All the authors have no potential conflicts of interest to disclose.

Research Involving Human Participants and/or Animals

This study is a meta-analytic review, and we did not collect data from any human participants and/or animals.

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Because our study is a meta-analytic review and we did not collect data from any human participants and/or animals, we do not have informed consent.

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Supplementary file1 (DOC 441 kb)

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Luan, Y., Zhao, K., Wang, Z. et al. Exploring the Antecedents of Unethical Pro-organizational Behavior (UPB): A Meta-Analysis. J Bus Ethics 187, 119–136 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05269-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05269-w

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