Why Good Employees Go Rogue
Photo by Mari Potter via Unsplash
Leaders work hard to create a vision for their organization. Great leaders inspire, support, and equip their people to achieve it. But even the best leaders will find themselves in situations where the application of their vision will take a sinister turn. At some point, almost every leader will encounter a rogue employee dispensing unsanctioned vigilante justice within the organization. These “dark knights” ensure social conformity and progress toward their own interpretation of the mission. Vigilantes attempt “to modify coworkers’ perceived misbehavior… on their own, taking on a self-appointed role in a community as judge, jury, and deliverer of justice” (Decelles & Aquino, 2000, p. 528). They seek to be the embodiment and arbiter for what they believe firm’s values in action to be. They enforce that perspective on others without the permission, support, or even knowledge of the organization’s formal leaders.
These rogue employees occur with regularity, can be difficult for leaders to identify, and impose a significant cost to the organization. A 2017 study of more than 2,200 U.S. employees found that while only 18% of study participants reported currently working with one, 42% reported having worked with a workplace vigilante at some point in their career. Even as the rate at which workers change employers has declined since the 1980s, there is more than enough turnover in the labor market to suggest that if your firm does not currently have a dark knight problem, it will eventually. Vigilantes can appear as model employees from a leadership perspective. They have internalized the mission and vision to such an extent that they see themselves as the defenders of the organization.
Crossing the line from company champion to vigilante can be subtle and often occurs away from leadership’s line of sight. For example, the leader of a sales team who believes in the firm’s policies and procedures is an asset. That same leader can become a liability if they believe passionately enough that they punish perceived transgressors on their own, by withholding information and resources or preferentially assigning sales leads to those they believe to be “good” employees, rather than relying on human resource protocols and chain of command. Such vigilante behavior undermines the firm’s culture, contributes to employee turnover, and may reduce overall financial performance.
As true believers and (twisted) champions of the organization, dark knights pose an especially difficult challenge for leaders. The phrase “one man’s hero is another man’s villain” has been frequently been used, by journalists and science fiction writers alike, to describe this phenomenon. Both hero and villain share a passion for their organization. The challenge is for leaders to successfully elevate heroes, address villains, and prevent the circumstances that give rise to vigilantes in the first place.
The Decelles and Aquino vigilante emergence model in the current issue of the Academy of Management Review provides valuable insight to address this challenge. While the full text is worth reading, here are a few high-level insights that leaders can use right away to get started:
Vigilantes arise when both the organizational context and the employee’s subjective experience align to create a space for the vigilante to emerge
Organizational Context: the domain of leadership
Strong or weak social controls set the table for the suppression or emergence of workplace vigilantes
Social controls are “the set of formal and informal behaviors, practices, and arrangements within the organization aimed at producing behavioral conformity to… employees’ common observance of shared rules that regulate conduct” (Decelles & Aquino, 2000, p. 530).
As an emergent process, social controls are closely related to workplace morality.
Well-developed social controls alone are not enough
Clear expectations must be supported by transparent and fair enforcement.
Robust systems for organizational justice improve performance, increase adherence to group norms, and remove incentives for employees to take enforcement into their own hands.
Organizational Justice systems do not need to be punitive to work. Punishment is not a prerequisite to employee learning and corrective action.
The subjective psychological context: the domain of the individual
When social controls are weak and organizational justice systems are not functioning properly, deviant behavior can flourish. To nascent vigilantes, this represents a significant threat to the organization that must be addressed. Without a functioning justice system to turn to, they are left to their own devices to address their fears, anxieties, and even anger that comes from watching others fail to live up to the standards they believe must be maintained for the firm to survive.
For those with a disposition towards authoritarianism and a moral certainty that they are working for the greater good of the organization, these factors combine in ways that create the motive, means, and opportunity to become a vigilante as they assume the role of justice-giver when they believe the organization itself has failed to do so.
Weak social controls and justice failures also allow vigilantes to remain invisible to leadership as other employees have no clear code of conduct through which to identify vigilantes and little confidence that reporting vigilante behavior through formal channels will address the issue productively.
While it is impossible for leaders to know what is happening inside an employee’s head, they are directly responsible for the organizational context that will either discourage or set the table for the rise of vigilantes in the first place. Leaders seeking to detect and prevent dark knights from wreaking havoc on their watch must build strong organizational controls through culture building, morality leadership, and strong organizational justice systems. It is a constant process of working to make the firm a better version of itself. It is hard work but outside perspective can help.
Let’s get to work!
