Unethical pro-organizational behavior and actors' work attitudes, behaviors, and performance: a meta-analysis.
Bending rules to help the company slightly lifts both good and bad staff acts, with emotions steering the wheel.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Sirao et al. (2026) pooled every paper they could find on unethical pro-organizational behavior. UPB means bending rules to help the company, like fudging records or hiding errors.
They ran a meta-analysis to see how these acts link to worker attitudes, helpful extra work, deviance, and job performance.
What they found
UPB slightly raised both good deeds (organizational citizenship) and bad deeds (workplace deviance).
It also nudged negative attitudes upward, but it did not move positive attitudes or overall performance.
Emotions sat in the middle: rule-bending first stirred feelings, then the feelings drove later actions.
How this fits with other research
Palmer et al. (2018) showed that simply having an experimenter in the room cut college students’ off-task behavior in half. Li’s paper widens the lens: staff behavior also swings when the pressure comes from inside the company, not from a watching researcher.
Pugliese et al. (2025) found that anonymous group contingencies lifted staff graph completion. Li adds a warning: if the contingency pushes staff to bend ethics, you may gain compliance but invite deviance.
Erath et al. (2021) catalogued single-case and group designs for OBM. Li gives practitioners a ready-made dependent variable—UPB—that can be tracked with those same designs.
Why it matters
You now know that praising "whatever it takes" can backfire. Small rule breaks may boost helpful acts yet plant seeds of deviance. Track emotions first; they foretell later behavior. When you set contingencies, pair them with clear ethical rules and public feedback so staff feel proud, not conflicted.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior (UPB), as a special extra-role behavior with both pro-organizational and unethical characteristics, its impact on actors’ work outcomes has not yet reached a consensus. To address this gap, this study adopts a meta-analytic approach. Based on Affective Events Theory, this study conducts a meta-analysis of 44 literature (including 55 independent studies, 182 effect sizes, and 18,074 research samples) to systematically integrate the relationships and boundary conditions between UPB and actors’ work attitudes, work behaviors, and work performance, and explore the mediating role of emotions. The results show that: (1) UPB is significantly positively correlated with negative work attitudes (r̄ = 0.242, 95% CI = [0.098, 0.376]), organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) (r̄ = 0.226, 95% CI = [0.070, 0.372]), and deviant workplace Behavior (DWB) (r̄ = 0.232, 95% CI = [0.127, 0.331]), but not significantly correlated with positive work attitudes (r̄ = − 0.078, 95% CI = [−0.388, 0.248]) and work performance (r̄ = 0.125, 95% CI = [−0.049, 0.292]). (2) Boundary condition tests show that sampling methods (multi-wave vs. cross-sectional), cultural backgrounds (Eastern vs. Western) and gender have significant moderating effects on the above relationships. Specifically, multi-wave sampling strengthens the association between UPB and negative work attitudes; under Eastern cultural backgrounds, the impact of UPB on OCB and DWB is stronger; the higher the proportion of females, the weaker the association between UPB and DWB. (3) Mediating mechanism analysis reveals that UPB indirectly reduces negative work attitudes and indirectly promotes OCB through positive emotions. However, the mediating role of positive emotions in the relationship between UPB and DWB is not significant. Additionally, it indirectly promotes negative work attitudes through negative emotions, while the mediating role of negative emotions in the relationships between UPB and both OCB and DWB are not significant. The conclusions of this study reveal the complexity of UPB’s impact and the key mediating role of emotions, providing theoretical basis and practical enlightenment for organizations to manage employees’ UPB.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2026 · doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1697571