Breaking bad: A model of expatriate managerial misbehavior

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to develop a model to explain why and how some expatriate managers engage in misbehavior in host countries, a notoriously elusive phenomenon in the academe. Integrating social cognitive and fraud triangle theories, we conceptualize this phenomenon as an externally driven, cognitive decision‐making process. Specifically, we theorize that discrepancies between both home and host country environments and expatriate managerial and parent‐company performance expectations and on the ground realities that expatriates face trigger expatriate managerial cognitive self‐regulatory dynamics. Consequently, extrinsic reputation and intrinsic self‐esteem threats provide motivation for managers to learn vicariously from the host social environment about the effectiveness of misbehavior for achieving their goals. Expatriate self‐efficacy and the propensity to morally disengage moderate this process. Parent company controls also impact the influence of vicarious learning on expatriate managers' development of motivation, justification, and opportunities for misbehavior. Our model contributes to the misbehavior and expatriate literatures and extends social cognitive and fraud triangle theories.