Be Careful What You Ask for: The Negative Consequences of Unethical Requests on Job Performance and Citizenship Behaviors

Does receiving requests to engage in morally questionable behavior at work decrease one’s job performance? We draw on moral psychology and a psychological theory of meaning-making to explain the negative performance consequences of being the recipient of unethical requests. Specifically, participants of a laboratory experiment who received an unethical request from an experimenter performed worse on a cognitive task than those in a neutral-request condition (Study 1). Moreover, paired survey responses from a sample of U.S. working adults and their supervisors showed negative relationships between receiving unethical requests at work and both job performance and citizenship behaviors directed at the organization. These effects were mediated by a decrease in intrinsic job motivation, and moderated by moral disengagement (Study 2). Taken together, our studies suggest that receiving unethical requests can fundamentally change the meaning of one’s work and have negative performance consequences.