Nana Li

As a specific form of constructive deviance, it is difficult to judge how managerial pro-social rule-breaking will affect employees’ performance and when it will have a positive or negative impact on employees’ performance. This paper explores boundary conditions under which managerial pro-social rule-breaking behavior is sustainably beneficial or harmful to employees’ performance, through the meditating mechanism of leadership identification from a social identity perspective. Data were gathered across three phases from 283 pairs of individuals and their managers in three companies. A structural equation modeling (SEM) approach was adopted in this paper and the Monte Carlo method was used to estimate 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Results showed that for employees with high psychological work maturity, managerial pro-social rule-breaking behavior was negatively related to leadership identification, while the relationship was positive when employees have low psychological work maturity. Leadership identification, in turn, was positively related to employees’ performance (in and extra-role).

It is generally believed that having high performance expectations is an effective means of motivating employees to pursue excellence and sustain the motivation driven by it, while ignoring the negative impact that hinders the incentive to sustain such expectations. Drawing on the conservation of resources theory, we constructed a moderated mediation model to examine the relationship between supervisor’s high performance expectations and the employee’s territoriality utilizing data from 291 supervisor–subordinate dyads from two companies in China. The results revealed that task autonomy moderated the indirect and positive effect of high performance expectations on employees’ territoriality through stress, such that this indirect effect was stronger when employees were assigned to higher levels of task autonomy. The theoretical of these findings, as well as future research directions, are discussed.