Employee Moral Evaluation of Supervisor Leniency for Coworkers’ Misconduct: The Role of Attributed Altruistic and Instrumental Motives

Supervisors regularly make disciplinary decisions in organizations, and some supervisors may choose to act leniently. While research on supervisor discipline has shown its impact on transgressing employees, less is understood about how third-party observers interpret and react to supervisor leniency. To address this lack of knowledge, we utilize motive attribution theory and the literature on gender norms, and adopt a mixed methods design to investigate how third-party employees morally evaluate supervisor leniency based on their motive attributions of supervisor leniency, as well as the consequences associated with such moral evaluations. Study 1 first uses a micro-narrative procedure and an inductive analysis to demonstrate varied altruistic (e.g., empathy, punishment calibration, etc.) and instrumental motives (e.g., image maintenance, easier than punishment, etc.) that observing employees attribute to supervisor leniency. Based on this finding, we predict that perceived altruistic (instrumental) motives are associated with lower (higher) immorality evaluations, leading to more (less) supervisor-directed OCB and less (more) gossip, and these effects are contingent on supervisor gender such that these relationships are stronger for female supervisors. The results of Study 2 (i.e., a vignette-based experiment) and Study 3 (i.e., an event-contingent survey study) provide support for our predictions. Our findings contribute to the literature of supervisor leniency by highlighting the roles of motive attribution and supervisor gender in determining employee moral evaluations of leniency and the downstream consequences of such evaluations.