Supervisors Often Prefer Rule Breakers – Up to a Point (Michael Bratsis)

If you get caught breaking the rules, it’s not going to go well with the boss, right? Wrong. Research by AOM scholars shows that in many cases, supervisors are likely to reward people who intentionally break rules. (…)

When we think about people breaking the rules, we often think of selfish motives, you know, a villain or a thief doing bad things. But we wanted to flip the lens from rule breakers to the audiences around them and ask, ‘What did people in positions of power think about those people breaking the rules?’ For those who are breaking the rules in ways that can conceivably be construed that they’re trying to help the team win, or that they’re trying to make the organization better, leaders look at these types of rule breaking in a positive light. (…)

[Employees] may just see a more efficient path that means breaking the rules. I’d encourage people who run organizations to see what sort of rules they have in place that are really in the way of getting things done efficiently. If you’re making it harder for your employees to get the job done, they may break the rules to effectively do their job.” (…)

If [employees] think breaking the rules is going to be seen as a signal of commitment, this might be true, provided it’s interpreted in that way. But you’re really rolling the dice with a manager. [Managers may not] see that as pro-social, [but] as selfish. (…)

From https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amd.2022.0280.summary

Full article https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amd.2022.0280