Affective Commitment and Healthcare Professionals’ Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior: An Asymmetric Double-Edged Pattern Across Emotional-Labor Pathways and the Role of Moral Identity

Affective commitment is generally regarded as a positive employee attitude, yet strong emotional attachment to an organization may also create ethical risks when organizational interests conflict with professional or moral standards. Drawing on social identity theory and an emotional labor perspective, this study examines how affective commitment relates to healthcare professionals’ unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) through surface acting and deep acting, and whether moral identity serves as a boundary condition. Using survey data from 544 healthcare professionals across 11 medical institutions in China, we tested the proposed model using confirmatory factor analysis and bootstrapping. The results showed that affective commitment was positively associated with UPB. A significant positive indirect association through surface acting was observed, whereas the negative indirect association through deep acting was not statistically significant overall. Moral identity did not significantly moderate the relationship between surface acting and UPB, but it strengthened the negative relationship between deep acting and UPB. Further exploratory analysis showed that the negative indirect effect through deep acting emerged at mean and high levels of moral identity and became stronger as moral identity increased. Taken together, these findings suggest an asymmetric and conditional double-edged pattern in the relationship between affective commitment and UPB, in which the risk-related pathway through surface acting received overall support, whereas the potentially protective pathway through deep acting emerged only conditionally in the exploratory analysis.