The Dark Side of Guanxi HRM Practices: Moral Disengagement and Unethical Pro-supervisor Behavior

Abstract

Guanxi, the use of personal relationships to influence workplace decisions, raises significant ethical concerns due to its potential to undermine merit-based practices and lead to institutional unfairness. Guanxi has been commonly applied in human resource management (HRM). Examples include recruitment, training opportunities, performance evaluation, and reward allocation based on personal relationships between employees and their immediate supervisors instead of merit. This study explores the unethical consequences of guanxi HRM practices, which remain underexplored. Drawing upon social information processing theory, we investigate how guanxi HRM practices lead to employee unethical pro-supervisor behavior, which is intended to benefit supervisors but contravenes ethical norms. We propose that moral disengagement mediates this relationship and that the effect is intensified when supervisor–subordinate guanxi is strong rather than weak. Data from a three-wave field study of 383 employees support our hypotheses. By uncovering the cognitive mechanism and relational condition for the link between guanxi HRM and employee unethical pro-supervisor behavior, this study advances understanding of how and when informal relational systems shape (un)ethical outcomes within organizations.