Spirituality and organizational misbehavior

Alongside the emerging interest in workplace spirituality, there is an ever-growing interest in the antecedents, manifestations, and consequences of organizational misbehavior (OMB). In this study, we hypothesized that spirituality can mitigate the intention to misbehave at work and thus moderate the relationship between multilevel workplace antecedents and a measure of OMB. Special attention is given to job design, organization justice perceptions, and fulfillment of the psychological contract with the organization. Our findings show that while organizational spirituality (OS) is negatively correlated with OMB, individual spirituality (IS) serves as a moderator variable – but in a direction opposite to our predictions: highly spiritual people engage in more OMB in negative circumstances. We discuss some implications for managing human resources in work organizations.