When Do Greedy Entrepreneurs Exhibit Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior? The Role of New Venture Team Trust

Abstract

Greed is an excessive form of self-interest that leads individuals to pursue material wealth and immaterial desires with little or no concern for the well-being of others. While the literature suggests that greed results in managers acting unethically, a situational strength perspective suggests that this may not always be the case. Therefore, this paper aims at understanding how the new venture context, particularly the role of a team member's affective and cognitive trust in the new venture team, shapes the manifestation of greed in entrepreneurs’ unethical pro-organizational behavior—behavior that allows new venture team members to advance their ventures despite the violation of social norms. Consistent with our theorizing, we find that new venture team members’ affective and cognitive trust in their teams shape the relationship between greed and unethical pro-organizational behavior in opposing ways. Particularly, higher levels of greed are more likely to be connected to unethical pro-organizational behavior when a member's affective trust in the team is high and cognitive trust in the team is low. Our study offers implications for the entrepreneurship and management literatures, alongside implications for practice.

The Role of Cognitive and Affective Trust on Promoting Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior

“…Our findings suggest that affection based trust may help unlock the potential of unethical behavior by giving employees more confidence in supervisor's benevolence and sincerely care. In other words, when trust lock-in in the relationships of authority, the use of social exchanges and deep bonds of affective indebtedness may create the dark side of trust and then support unethical pro-organizational behavior (Skinner et al, 2014;Tacke et al, 2022). This research makes some contributions.…”

“…This research makes some contributions. Much of the literature on unethical behavior conceptualized unethical behavior as primarily self-benefiting (Kish-Gephart et al, 2010;Tacke et al, 2022). However, employees sometimes engage in unethical behavior to benefit their organization (Umphress & Bingham, 2011;Umphress et al, 2010).…”

“…Based on behavioral ethics (Brief et al, 2001;Vardi & Weitz, 2005), individuals may engage in unethical pro-organizational behavior to help the organization in some way. Viewing from new venture team trust, entrepreneurs' greed is more likely to be connected to unethical proorganizational behavior (Tacke, Knockaert, Patzelt, & Breugst, 2022) Mayer et al (1995). Cognitive trust is a rational inference that employees make decision from information about the supervisors' behavior under ability and integrity.…”

“…When the supervisor needed to make an action that was concerned with the collective good but contrary to employee intention such as unethical proorganizational behavior (Ebrahimi, 2017;Shaw & Liao, 2021). Affective bond between employees and supervisors would reflect more of a lack of defensiveness against doing the action (Chen et al, 2014;Tacke et al, 2022;Xu & Wang, 2020).…”

“I Think You Are Trustworthy, Need I Say More?” The Factor Structure and Practicalities of Trustworthiness Assessment

“…To this day, these scales have served as two of the most predominantly employed measures of trustworthiness in literature, but the research examining their underlying factor validity has been surprisingly scant. At the time of this writing, both scales have been cited thousands of times (based on a Google Scholar search), as well as employed in research published as recently as the same month of this writing (e.g., Navarro-Picado et al, 2022;Tacke et al, 2022). In many cases, the scales are not modified beyond changing the referent, or only items representing some of the factors are used.…”