How Leaders Compensate for Time Theft: A Moral Cleansing Perspective

Time theft is a costly unethical workplace deviant behavior. Previous studies have largely focused on the antecedents of time theft at the employee level, while neglecting how leaders deal with their past unethical time theft behavior. Based on moral cleansing theory, we explore the link between leader time theft and their subsequent proactive helping behavior. We also study the mediating role of guilt and perceived loss of moral credits, as well as the moderating role of moral reflectiveness. We conducted two studies to test our hypotheses: a scenario-based experiment involving 140 participants in management roles (Study 1), and a multi-wave and multi-source field survey involving 197 managers and their 940 subordinates working in different industries (Study 2). Results showed that leaders who engaged in time theft experienced high levels of guilt and perceived loss of moral credits, which in turn encouraged them to offer proactive helping behaviors to their employees. In addition, moral reflectiveness reinforces this indirect effect by raising their awareness of unethical behavior. Our research provides insights into when and how leaders’ unethical time theft can trigger more constructive behavior.