The accelerating social transformation and change have led to the increasing uncertainty of the organizational environment, and the globalization, migration movement, and cultural integration have increasingly diversified the values and cultures in organizations. Under this context, both formal organizational rules and informal unwritten norms frequently conflict with or decouple from the personal needs of individuals or the practical goals of organizations. As a result, organization managers and individuals linked to different sections widely violate organizational norms, engaging in deviant behaviors. Currently, due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and economic downtrend, organizations are facing more serious challenges, and individuals will encounter higher pressures from work performance and life difficulties, which will intensify the conflicts mentioned above, making deviant behavior gradually become a major challenge for organizational management in the future.

Theoretical studies and organizational practices show that, for one thing, individuals will destructively deviate from the rules to achieve self-interest purposes, such as retreat, abuse, delay, organizational politics, etc., leading to huge economic losses to organizations, for another thing, individuals will constructively deviate from the rules to improve organizational welfare or help other stakeholders, such as pro-social rule-breaking, pro-customer deviance and bootleg innovation, which is a “double-edged sword” for organizations and often makes managers face moral dilemmas. Although plenty of studies have conducted in-depth discussions on these topics and analyzed the predictive role of individual traits, organizational characteristics, leadership style, and other factors with respect to deviant behaviors, it is still far from meeting the needs of management practice. Specifically, the formation mechanism of deviant behaviors at the cognitive level and the social-psychosocial consequences for actors and bystanders are not systematically explored. In order to fill these gaps, we set this special issue to comprise a collection of empirical and theoretical studies covering a wide range of themes related to “Deviant Behavior in the Workplace” to explore the antecedents and consequences of deviant behaviors from the perspectives of cognition, morality, and decision psychology, etc., helping organizations better manage such behaviors and meet future management challenges.

In particular, submissions that address issues related (but not limited) to the following main topics are warmly welcomed:
1. New perspectives and types to understand deviant behavior in the workplace;
2. The formation mechanism of deviant behavior from the perspective of moral decision-making (including moral consciousness, intuition, reflection, rationalization, consultation, judgment, intention, and action, etc.);
3. The influence of cognitive schema on deviant behavior;
4. The influence of moral predisposition on deviant behavior;
5. Interaction between deviant behaviors of superiors and subordinates;
6. The internal relationship between different types of deviant behaviors;
7. The diffusion of the same type of deviant behavior within the organization (such as from the perspectives of social learning, psychological infection and window breaking effect, etc.);
8. The consequences of deviant behavior on oneself (including work attitude, emotion, belief, behavior, etc.);
9. Bystanders’ cognitive processing of deviant behavior and its consequences;
10. Cross-cultural differences in the antecedents and consequences of deviant behavior.

Submit your idea

Impact

Frontiers in Psychology

Participating Journals

Impact