Pro-Social Rule Breaking: Determinants, Manager Responses and Rationalizations

This book explores the topic of pro-social rule-breaking — more specifically, when employees break formal organizational rules intending to help the company. Generally, managers react to rule-breaking with sanctions; this may lead one to question why some employees break the rules without any apparent personal advantages despite the risk of being sanctioned. The first part of this book discusses the various reasons for rule-breaking based on literature. Leadership-related factors are notably important: how leaders have reacted to pro-social rule-breaking in the past often influences future employee behavior. For this reason, the second part of this book empirically deals with the leadership perspective, which has been largely neglected in research so far. In response to pro-social rule-breaking, leaders face a dilemma because they are subject to competing demands: ensuring rule compliance versus goal achievement. Therefore, the goal of this book is to research and identify cues that leaders use to rationalize their response to pro-social rule-breaking. In this way, I aim to create a better understanding of responses to well-intentioned rule-breaking.