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<p>Despite growing recognition that negative leadership practices often trigger adverse employee behaviors, the mechanisms and conditions linking leader noncontingent punishment (NCP) to counterproductive behaviors such as cyberloafing remain poorly understood. To address this gap, we develop and test a moderated mediation model to explain how and when leader NCP behavior leads to employee cyberloafing. Drawing upon social cognitive theory, we argue that leader NCP behavior may induce moral disengagement in employees, which in turn serves as the key mechanism driving cyberloafing. Furthermore, we hypothesize that employees’ hostile attribution bias intensifies the positive relationship between leader NCP behavior and moral disengagement. Analyses of two-wave data collected from 277 employees across three Chinese manufacturing firms provide support for our hypotheses. Our findings advance the literature on destructive leadership and employee deviance by introducing a socially situated cognitive perspective that helps explain why cyberloafing emerges as a morally rationalized response to leader noncontingent punishment, and offer practical insights for mitigating counterproductive behaviors in increasingly digitalized work environments.</p>

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When Fairness Falls Short: Linking Leader Noncontingent Punishment to Cyberloafing Through Moral Disengagement

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月6日

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  • Ting Cao,
  • Jiatong Liu,
  • Jin Cheng,
  • Xinhui Hu

摘要

Despite growing recognition that negative leadership practices often trigger adverse employee behaviors, the mechanisms and conditions linking leader noncontingent punishment (NCP) to counterproductive behaviors such as cyberloafing remain poorly understood. To address this gap, we develop and test a moderated mediation model to explain how and when leader NCP behavior leads to employee cyberloafing. Drawing upon social cognitive theory, we argue that leader NCP behavior may induce moral disengagement in employees, which in turn serves as the key mechanism driving cyberloafing. Furthermore, we hypothesize that employees’ hostile attribution bias intensifies the positive relationship between leader NCP behavior and moral disengagement. Analyses of two-wave data collected from 277 employees across three Chinese manufacturing firms provide support for our hypotheses. Our findings advance the literature on destructive leadership and employee deviance by introducing a socially situated cognitive perspective that helps explain why cyberloafing emerges as a morally rationalized response to leader noncontingent punishment, and offer practical insights for mitigating counterproductive behaviors in increasingly digitalized work environments.