Gaming the System: An Investigation of Worker Expertise and Unethical Behavior

Employee socialization is considered critical for effective management and organizational success. As employees assimilate to their organization’s norms and codes of conduct, their job satisfaction, job commitment, and loyalty to their organization are expected to improve. In this work, we find evidence that challenges these expectations. Specifically, we show that experienced employees are more likely to deceive their employer relative to inexperienced employees and that experienced employees feel excited after engaging in this deception. We further show that experienced employees’ expertise about the tasks they are assigned play a critical role in their choice to deceive. Taken together, our work provides insight into antecedents of unethical behavior and makes significant contributions to the organizational socialization and emotions literatures. Our work also makes significant methodological contributions to the study of unethical behavior and provides guidance for ethics and negotiations researchers.