Underdog Expectations and Employees’ Interpersonal Counterproductive Work Behavior: The Mediating Roles of Perceived Insider Status and Moral Disengagement

As organizational competition intensifies, employees have become increasingly responsive to evaluative cues from their work environment. Among these, underdog expectations—employees’ perceptions that others view them as unlikely to succeed—can trigger strong psychological reactions that shape interpersonal behavior. Drawing on self-determination theory, this study examines how underdog expectations influence employees’ interpersonal counterproductive work behavior (CWB-I). Using a three-wave time-lagged survey design with 221 employees, we found that underdog expectations positively predict CWB-I through two parallel psychological mechanisms: increased moral disengagement and reduced perceived insider status. In addition, organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) strengthens these indirect effects, such that the mediating relationships are stronger among employees with high OBSE. These findings extend research on underdog expectations by revealing both relational and cognitive pathways linking negative evaluative expectations to interpersonal deviance, while also highlighting the complex role of self-evaluative organizational identity in shaping employees’ behavioral responses to status-based threats.