How Employee Individualism-collectivism Orientations Predict Workplace Vigilantism

Workplace vigilantism refers to activities that employees carry out to monitor their workplace for signs of wrongdoings and effect unauthorized justice based on perceived sense of right and wrong. Extant research gives less attention to how individual differences might predict employees’ vigilantism at work. We propose that employee individualism-collectivism orientations may lead to different cognition of workplace vigilantism, perceiving it with risk or efficacy of adopting a vigilante identity as represented by employee perceptions of relationship cost or pro-team motivation, which in turn may affect their engagement in self-appointed mission of monitoring and punishing perceived wrongdoers. We also propose a moderator-task interdependence. We tested this theoretical model in a field study of a sample of 357 employees, which demonstrate our hypotheses largely. Specifically, we found that collectivism-oriented employee gives more attention to the efficacy that vigilantism brings to the work group or team, and they may give less attention to the risk (relationship cost) from engagement in workplace vigilantism. In contrast, individualism-oriented employees may pay more attention to potential risks of effecting vigilantism, which in turn is less likely to motivate them to participate in vigilante activities. Besides, our study have demonstrated that task interdependence moderates the indirect relationship between collectivism orientation and workplace vigilantism, such that the relationship is stronger via perceived workplace vigilantism efficacy when task interdependence low rather than high. Theoretical and practical implications are offered.