Culture in the workplace drives unethical behavior that helps the company, study of Indian IT workers finds

When an employee hides damaging data from a regulator to protect their employer, or pads a report to make the company look better, they are not acting out of greed or malice. Psychologists call this unethical pro-organisational behaviour, or UPB: misconduct committed with the deliberate intention of helping the organisation. A new empirical study from India suggests that whether people cross this moral line depends not only on their personal character but on cultural values they carry, and that time spent inside an industry changes which of those values matter.

The study, published in Current Psychology by Shekhar Manelkar of Symbiosis International University, Dharmesh K. Mishra of Symbiosis Institute of International Business, and Kishore Ashok Manelkar of Somaiya Institute of Management, examines how six of Geert Hofstede’s cultural value dimensions predict UPB among 216 employees of the Indian information technology industry. The researchers drew on Role Theory, which holds that people behave according to the roles and expectations they absorb from their social environments. Their central question was whether cultural values act uniformly on unethical behaviour, or whether the process of becoming socialised into an industry amplifies some values while silencing others.

Hofstede’s framework describes cultures along dimensions such as power distance, the acceptance of unequal authority; masculinity, an orientation toward competition and achievement; indulgence, the tolerance of gratifying one’s impulses; and their counterparts, individualism, uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation. Traditionally these dimensions have been used to compare countries, but the researchers measured them at the level of the individual, following the established CVSCALE approach. This allows a much finer-grained analysis, because two employees in the same national culture can hold very different personal values.

Data were gathered through snowball sampling, in which initial participants referred colleagues to the survey. The team analysed the responses using partial least squares structural equation modelling, a statistical technique well suited to testing how multiple latent psychological variables relate to an outcome, and then ran a multi-group analysis across three groups defined by industry tenure, from newcomers to long-tenured veterans. Tenure served as a proxy for the degree of industry socialisation, the process by which newcomers internalise the norms, values and expected behaviours of their professional world.

The results were strikingly selective. Of the six cultural dimensions studied, only three significantly predicted unethical pro-organisational behaviour: power distance, masculinity and indulgence. Together they explained 39 percent of the variance in UPB, a substantial share for a behavioural construct shaped by so many situational factors. Individualism, uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation, despite their prominence in cross-cultural ethics debates, showed no significant relationship with the tendency to behave unethically for the organisation’s benefit.

Power distance emerged as the most consistent and robust predictor. Employees who accept hierarchical authority as natural and legitimate were more likely to engage in unethical behaviour aimed at helping the company, and this effect held across all three tenure groups. It also strengthened with experience: the longer employees remained in the IT industry, the more strongly their deference to authority translated into misconduct in the organisation’s name. The finding aligns with earlier research linking power distance to fear of authority and to compliance with authoritarian leaders, mechanisms that can lead employees to follow directives without scrutinising their ethics.

Masculinity told a different story. A competitive, achievement-oriented value orientation predicted UPB only among employees with moderate to long tenure, not among newcomers. The authors interpret this through the lens of socialisation: early-career employees have not yet absorbed the industry’s competitive scripts, but as they progress, a strong drive for success and status appears to fuse with organisational loyalty, producing a willingness to bend ethical rules to secure wins. This echoes classic scholarship on how managerial cultures reward assertive, results-at-any-cost behaviour.

Indulgence showed a third, almost inverted pattern. Employees high in indulgence, who value pleasure and free gratification of desires, were more prone to unethical pro-organisational behaviour, but only in the short-tenure group. The effect disappeared among experienced workers, suggesting that industry socialisation over time restrains the hedonistic impulses that can initially facilitate rule-breaking, or that indulgent newcomers eventually either adapt to tighter norms or exit the field. The study thus paints a dynamic picture in which the same cultural value can drive misconduct at one career stage and be neutralised at another.

The theoretical upshot is that cultural values do not operate as fixed, uniform levers on unethical behaviour. Role Theory, the authors argue, explains this contingency: organisations assign roles, and socialisation into those roles selectively reinforces some value-behaviour links while weakening others. A deferential disposition becomes ethically dangerous only in a context that rewards unquestioning loyalty; a competitive streak becomes dangerous only once an industry has taught the employee what counts as winning. Moral disengagement, in Bandura’s sense, may then supply the psychological licence, allowing employees to reframe wrongdoing as service to a collective good.

For practitioners, the findings carry concrete implications. Ethics training that treats all employees identically may miss its target, because the psychological routes to misconduct differ by career stage. Organisations in high power distance environments might focus on protecting early-tenure staff from authority pressure and on building voice channels so that deference does not become complicity, while veteran employees may need interventions aimed at competitive overreach. The authors caution that the study must be replicated in other industries and cultures before the patterns can be considered general, but its core message is already provocative: the roots of workplace misconduct lie not just in individual morality, but in the cultural soil and the professional roles in which that morality takes shape.

Subject of Research: How Hofstede's cultural values and industry socialisation predict unethical pro-organisational behaviour among IT employees

Article Title: Beyond individual morality: an empirical study on how cultural values of masculinity, power distance and indulgence impact unethical pro-organisational behaviour

Article References: Manelkar, S., Mishra, D. K., & Manelkar, K. A. (2026). Beyond individual morality: an empirical study on how cultural values of masculinity, power distance and indulgence impact unethical pro-organisational behaviour. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1431. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09962-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09962-1

Keywords: unethical pro-organisational behaviour, Hofstede cultural dimensions, power distance, masculinity, indulgence, role theory, organisational socialisation, business ethics, Indian IT industry, PLS-SEM, workplace misconduct, tenure