When And Why Breaking The Rules For A Good Cause Doesn’t Pay Off: The Influence of Prosocial Rule-Breaking on Trust

Abstract: Although prosocial rule-breaking (PSRB) is driven by ostensibly honorable intentions to help rather than harm the organization or its stakeholders, relatively little is known about how people interpret and judge the prosocial rule-breaker’s motive and behavior. We propose that PSRB poses an inevitable trust dilemma by challenging the conventional understanding of trust within organizations, as it forces coworkers to reconcile different values of trustworthiness —specifically, integrity and benevolence. Across three complementary studies, we investigated how coworkers navigated this tradeoff when they decided whether to trust a prosocial rule-breaker. Studies 1 and 2 experimentally revealed that although observers appreciated the prosocial rule-breaker’s benevolent intentions, their concerns about the person’s integrity dominated their judgments, leading to reduced trust in the rule-breaker. Study 3 replicated the experimental results in a field study, suggesting that coworkers trusted prosocial rule-breakers less in the workplace because they were concerned about the rule-breakers’ integrity.

Keywords: Trust dilemma, prosocial behavior, prosocial rule-breaking, benevolence, integrity.