Unpacking the Paradoxical Effects of Leaders’ Follower-Directed Prosocial Rule Breaking on Followers

Given the paradoxical nature of leaders’ follower-directed prosocial rule-breaking, which simultaneously involves sincere effort to help the followers yet violates organizational norms, our work builds a theoretical model to explain employees’ psychological and behavioral reactions to this specific form of leader deviant behavior. Drawing upon social information processing theory, we propose that leaders’ follower-directed prosocial rule breaking signals different social cues and elicits followers’ simultaneously but contrasting feelings: On one hand, perceived acceptability of norm violations (for having behaved in norm-violation ways) and on the other, gratitude (for having done something helpful for the followers). In turn, perceived acceptability of norm violations motivates follower deviance, whereas gratitude motivates leader-directed helping. Results of a time-lagged multisource field survey data offer support for our hypotheses. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of these findings.