Scholars agree that trust primarily has two bases: trustworthiness—the extent to which a trustee is competent, honest, and has goodwill toward the trustor—and trust propensity—a stable trait reflecting the trustor's generalized belief that others can be trusted. Due to this trait characterization, the literature has largely reached a consensus that trust propensity is only an important base of trust in the earliest stage of a relationship—before information on trustworthiness has been gathered. Additionally, the trait conceptualization of trust propensity inhibits it from being modeled as an explanatory mechanism. Drawing on accessibility theory, a theory of trait activation, we argue that trust propensity has state‐like characteristics that are “activated” by the daily treatment an employee receives from coworkers. Our model highlights that the social context—predominantly ignored in prior trust research because of its lack of relevance to dyadic perceptions of trustworthiness—can have a substantial impact on dyadic trust. Across two multisource experience sampling methodology studies, we provide evidence that state trust propensity transmits the effects of citizenship and deviance received to trust in a focal coworker, whether that focal coworker is a source of that treatment or not. We also address how general levels of workplace unfairness—a between‐person construct—influence these dynamics. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these within‐person dynamics for fostering trust within organizations.

Summary A growing literature has suggested that high performance goals can have unintended consequences within organizations as employees engage in unethical behavior to achieve outcomes associated with goal attainment. Extending research on the dark side of goal setting, we suggest that high performance goals not only create a desire to achieve a particular outcome but also alter moral reasoning processes related to goal attainment. Integrating goal‐setting theory with motivated moral reasoning, we hypothesize an indirect effect of high performance goals on unethical behavior via state moral disengagement. We also examine goal commitment—which tends to amplify the relationship between high goals and performance—as a key boundary condition associated with this indirect effect. We build this conditional indirect effect model across three studies conducted in the field and the laboratory. Our results provide new insight into both when and why high goals can facilitate moral disengagement and unethical behavior within organizations.

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Organizations have long sought to mitigate risks associated with unsupervised employee conduct (e.g., employee deviance) through employee monitoring, an approach consistent with traditional theorizing. Yet the effectiveness of employee monitoring as a deviance deterrent has been called into question by emerging evidence suggesting that monitored employees may actually engage in higher levels of deviance. To address this critical tension and shed light on why and when monitoring leads to deviance, we draw upon social cognitive theory to examine the self-regulatory consequences of employee monitoring. We theorize that monitoring paradoxically creates conditions for more (not less) deviance by diminishing employees’ sense of agency, thereby facilitating moral disengagement via displacement of responsibility. Integrating fairness heuristic theory, we further argue that overall justice provides a powerful heuristic that mitigates the potential loss of sense of agency associated with monitoring. Accordingly, we suggest that employee perceptions of high justice will attenuate displacement of responsibility and, in turn, deviance. Across a field study and an experimental study, we find converging support for our predictions and rule out alternative explanations. This research provides important theoretical and practical insights into how monitoring can be used effectively without also promoting unintended consequences.

We consider the possibility that a positive organizational reputation brings both benefits and burdens to employees working for those organizations. Drawing from the “Red Queen” notion in competitive strategy and from conservation of resources theory, we argue that although organizational reputation can cause employees to identify more strongly with the organization, it may also pressure employees to commit more of their time to the job. In turn, increased organizational identification and time commitment have contrasting effects on employees’ emotional exhaustion. Following recent theorizing in the reputation literature, we also test the proposal that the effects of organizational reputation—a collective‐level representation—are mediated through employees’ individual‐level perceptions. Taken together, our theoretical model suggests that organizational reputation, through employees’ perceptions of that reputation, simultaneously serves as a benefit that reduces emotional exhaustion via organizational identification, but also as a burden that increases emotional exhaustion via additional time commitment. In turn, we demonstrate that these dynamics have both positive and negative implications for employees’ counterproductive work behavior. Our arguments are confirmed in a multiwave, multisource study of employees from a diverse range of organizations.