The Effect of Performance Pressure on Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior Among Sales Employees : The Mediating Role of Organizational Identification and the Moderating Role of Perceived Competitive Climate

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

As organizations face stronger market competition, they often raise expectations for sales growth, target achievement, and performance outcomes. In this process, employees may choose questionable ways to support organizational goals. One important example is unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB). UPB encompasses conduct oriented toward serving the organization or its members yet transgresses moral principles, prevailing social expectations, legal requirements, or established behavioral norms. Although such behavior may seem useful for short-term performance, it can damage organizational reputation, customer trust, legal compliance, and social responsibility over time. This issue is particularly relevant to sales employees, because their work usually involves clear targets, strict evaluation, direct contact with customers, and frequent comparison with coworkers.
Performance pressure is identified here as a key antecedent of UPB. Performance pressure is not simply heavy workload or general job stress. Its key feature is that employees believe their performance results are closely tied to meaningful outcomes, including pay, promotion, evaluation, job security, and future career opportunities. When employees perceive underperformance as a potential erosion of the resources they hold dear, their attention shifts toward immediate goal achievement and shielding what they still possess. Under this condition, unethical actions may be seen as a practical way to avoid failure, protect resources, or meet required targets.
Grounded in COR theory, a moderated mediation framework is constructed to trace the pathway through which performance pressure may give rise to UPB among sales employees. Within this framework, performance pressure is conceptualized as a signal of resource endangerment capable of eroding employees' psychological bond with the organization. Organizational identification serves as the intervening variable in this chain. Workers who maintain high organizational identification prove more attentive to organizational norms, the institution's enduring public standing, and its moral constraints. Conversely, as organizational identification weakens, these normative concerns recede from employees' decision-making.
A central argument of this study is that UPB does not always come from strong loyalty to the organization. Under high performance pressure, employees may still rely on the organization for income, evaluation, promotion, and career security, even when their psychological attachment to the organization becomes weaker. Accordingly, employees may resort to UPB not out of a strong sense of organizational belonging, but because the organization's performance outcomes remain tied to their personal resource preservation. In this sense, UPB may appear pro-organizational in form, while its underlying motive may be more instrumental and self-protective.
CPC is additionally incorporated as a boundary condition in the proposed framework. Competitive psychological climate captures employees' perception that rewards, recognition, and opportunities are allocated based on relative performance compared with coworkers. Competition may increase pressure and resource use, but this study focuses on its rule-clarifying function. When comparison standards and reward rules are more visible, employees may better understand what performance expectations mean and how effort can lead to valued resources. Consequently, elevated CPC is expected to attenuate the harmful impact that performance pressure exerts on organizational identification, thereby also diminishing the OI-mediated pathway from performance pressure to UPB.
A two-wave time-lagged survey was conducted with sales employees in China. In Wave 1, 610 questionnaires were administered, resulting in 494 valid responses. One month after the first study, the second wave of investigation was given to the first wave of participants who met the inclusion criteria.After matching the two waves, 321 valid cases were retained for analysis. The study used Stata 18.0 and the SPSS PROCESS macro to examine reliability and validity, CMB, correlations, hierarchical regression models, bootstrap mediation effects, and the moderated mediation structure.
The findings supported the proposed model. Performance pressure showed a positive link to UPB and a negative link to organizational identification. Organizational identification, in turn, proved negatively associated with UPB and functioned as a significant mediator in the PP–UPB pathway. Put concretely, elevated performance pressure predicted diminished organizational identification, which in turn predicted heightened UPB. The results also showed that competitive psychological climate conditioned the effect of performance pressure on organizational identification. The negative influence of performance pressure on organizational identification is weakened in the more competitive psychological climate. Mediation analysis further revealed that CPC attenuates the OI-mediated indirect pathway connecting performance pressure to UPB, operating through its dampening effect on organizational identification.
Several theoretical contributions emerge from this work. To begin with, the present inquiry broadens the literature on the adverse consequences of performance pressure by establishing that performance pressure shapes employees' propensity for UPB. Second, it adds to UPB research by showing that lower organizational identification may also create ethical risk under performance pressure, because employees may rely less on normative constraints and more on short-term resource protection. Third, it applies conservation of resources theory to organizational ethics research by showing how resource threat, identity-related resource loss, and climate cues jointly shape employees' ethical choices. Turning to managerial implications, the evidence indicates that organizations ought to not only manage performance demands but also define ethical boundaries clearly, monitor the ethical risks of high-pressure performance systems, and design internal competition in a transparent and responsible way.
Because the sample consisted of Chinese sales employees, the findings should be interpreted within this setting. China’s collectivist orientation, relationship-based work norms, and relatively high power distance may affect how employees understand organizational interests, performance pressure, and UPB. Therefore, this context is both a meaningful research setting and a boundary condition of the study. Overall, this study suggests that UPB may emerge from the combined influence of performance pressure, weakened identity-based resources, and the competitive environment.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• CHAPTER 1. Introduction 1
• 1.1 Research Question 1
• 1.2 Research Purpose 4
• 1.3 Research Process 6
• 1.4 Research Significance 9
• CHAPTER 2. Literature Review 13
• 2.1 Conservation of Resources Theory 13
• 2.2 Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior 14
• 2.2.1 Definition and Conceptualization 14
• 2.2.2 Measurement 17
• 2.2.3 Antecedents 18
• 2.2.4 Outcome 21
• 2.3 Performance Pressure 23
• 2.3.1 Definition and Conceptualization 23
• 2.3.2 Measurement 25
• 2.3.3 Antecedents 27
• 2.3.4 Outcome 30
• 2.4 Organizational Identification 32
• 2.4.1 Definition and Conceptualization 32
• 2.4.2 Measurement 35
• 2.4.3 Antecedents 38
• 2.4.4 Outcome 42
• 2.5 Competitive Psychological Climate 43
• 2.5.1 Definition and Conceptualization 44
• 2.5.2 Measurement 48
• 2.5.3 Antecedents 50
• 2.5.4 Outcome 53
• CHAPTER 3. Hypotheses 57
• 3.1 Research Model 57
• 3.2 Hypothesis Development 59
• 3.2.1 Performance Pressure and Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior 59
• 3.2.2 Performance Pressure and Organizational Identification 61
• 3.2.3 Organizational Identification and Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior 63
• 3.2.4 The Mediating Role of Organizational Identification 65
• 3.2.5 The Moderating Role of Competitive Psychological Climate 67
• 3.2.6 The Moderated Mediating Role of Competitive Psychological Climate 70
• CHAPTER 4.Method 73
• 4.1 Data Collection Procedures 73
• 4.1.1 Research Design 73
• 4.1.2 Data Collection 74
• 4.2 Sample 76
• 4.3 Measures 80
• 4.3.1 Performance Pressure 80
• 4.3.2 Organizational Identification 80
• 4.3.3 Competitive Psychological Climate 81
• 4.3.4 Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior 81
• 4.3.5 Control Variables 82
• 4.4 Analytical Procedures 82
• 4.4.1 Preliminary Analyses Procedures 83
• 4.4.2 Testing Hypotheses Procedures 84
• CHAPTER 5. Results 87
• 5.1 Preliminary Analyses 87
• 5.1.1 Descriptive Statistics 87
• 5.1.2 Reliability and Validity89
• 5.1.3 Common Method Bias Test 93
• 5.1.4 Correlation Analysis 98
• 5.1.5 Descriptive Visualization of Key Variables 101
• 5.2 Hypothesis Testing 102
• 5.2.1 Direct Effects of Performance Pressure and Organizational Identification 103
• 5.2.2 The Effect of Performance Pressure on Organizational Identification 103
• 5.2.3 The Effect of Organizational Identification on Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior 104
• 5.2.4 The Mediating Role of Organizational Identification 106
• 5.2.5 The Moderating Role of Competitive Psychological Climate 107
• 5.2.6 The Moderated Mediation Effect 109
• 5.3 Summary of Hypotheses Testing Results 114
• CHAPTER 6. Discussion 115
• 6.1 Summary 115
• 6.2 Theoretical Contributions 116
• 6.3 Practical Implications 121
• 6.4 Limitations and Future Research 125
• CHAPTER 7. Conclusion 130
• References 134
• Appendix 1. Survey 156
• Wave 1 Questionnaire 159
• Wave 2 Questionnaire 160
• Appendix 2. Survey in Chinese 161
• Wave 1 Questionnaire 163
• Wave 2 Questionnaire 165
• 국문초록 166