Rebel with a cause: the effects of leadership encouragement and psychological safety on professionals' prosocial rulebreaking behavior

Abstract

A core idea of bureaucratic organizations is that rule-following is a necessary precondition to pursue the publicinterest. However, rules may sometimes become dysfunc-tional, burdensome, and even interfere with public valuedelivery. In those situations, professionals sometimesengage in prosocial rule-breaking (PSRB), rather than rule-following, with the aim to deliver meaningful public ser-vices. This article examines leadership encouragement andpsychological safety as antecedents of PSRB behavior. Datafrom two waves of a multi-source dataset consisting of pro-fessionals' self-reported PSRB behavior and psychologicalsafety (n=837 and 965 respondents) and their supervisor-reported encouragement for PSRB behavior (n=58 and64 respondents) is used. Findings point to a positive rela-tionship between psychological safety and PSRB. Moreover,the study partly supports the hypothesis that leadershipencouragement is associated with higher levels of PSRB,but only under conditions of high psychological safety.