Employee Deviance: Retaliation after Employer’s Response to COVID-19

Research has advanced our understanding of the causes of employee deviance, including employee retaliation intentions and behaviors. We know less about how employer decisions that put employees’ safety at risk, for example relaxing COVID-19 restrictions once allowed by state governors to do so, might influence employees’ deviance intentions. In this study, we examine whether retaliation intentions are particularly high among employees perceiving lower organizational support, having higher turnover intentions, and with a greater ease of leaving the employer. We utilize the negative norm of reciprocity and equity as enabling theories to build a model that we test with a survey of 327 working adults in the United States. We analyze the moderated-moderated-mediation model with a path analytic and bootstrapping procedure that tests the model’s indirect effects. We find support for the proposed model, with the exception of the proposed interaction between perceived organizational support and ease of leaving. This work makes several theoretical contributions in the areas of business ethics, and employee deviance and by identifying boundary conditions for the relationship between employee perceptions of low organizational support and retaliation intentions. Specifically, we highlight the originality of the moderating effects of preexisting turnover intentions and the perceived ease of leaving the employer on deviance intentions. Practical implications include the importance of increasing employees’ perceptions of organizational support when difficult organizational decisions and policies might put employee safety at increased risk, which is particularly likely to reduce retaliation intentions among people intending to stay with the organization.