Silent Majority: How Employees’ Perceptions of Corporate Hypocrisy are Related to their Silence

Yiming Wang, Yuhua Xie, Mingwei Liu, Yongxing Guo, Duojun He

Journal of Business Ethics · 2024 · Volume 195 · Issue 2

Abstract

Extant studies of corporate hypocrisy have largely overlooked its implications for employees until recently. Drawing upon social information processing theory, we theorize the impact of corporate hypocrisy on employee silence—an employee behavior potentially detrimental to both organizations and society, as well as the underlying mediating and moderating mechanisms. We empirically tested our hypotheses with two studies. In Study 1, we found that corporate hypocrisy was positively related to employee silence through both employee cognitive trust and employee prosocial motivation. In Study 2, we revealed that consumer pressure weakened the mediating roles of employee cognitive trust and prosocial motivation, while regulatory pressure strengthened these roles. Overall, this study sheds light on whether, how, and when employees remain silent when they perceive corporate hypocrisy. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Keywords

Corporate hypocrisy, Employee silence, Cognitive trust, Prosocial motivation, Consumer pressure, Regulatory pressure

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