Linking perceived ethical climate to organizational deviance: The cognitive, affective, and attitudinal mechanisms

In this study, we extend previous research by proposing and testing three psychological mechanisms explaining the relationship between perceived ethical climate and organizational deviance. We collected data from a sample of 212 pairs of employees and their coworkers from seven electronics companies in Taiwan and used structural equation modeling to test our hypotheses on the matched employee-coworker data. The results of this study confirmed our hypothesis concerning the mediation of employees' job satisfaction on the relationship between their perceived ethical climate and organizational deviance. According to the results, we also found that employees' perceived organizational support and positive affect mediated the above relationship through job satisfaction. After the above mediation effects were accounted for, we found that there remained an almost-nil association between perceived ethical climate and organizational deviance. Implications for management and future research are discussed.