The Good Soldier Paradox: A Dual-Pathway Framework Linking Citizenship Pressure to Workplace Deviance Through Moral Disengagement

Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has long been understood mainly as a positive force associated with collective performance and organizational effectiveness. Recent management research has made this view less straightforward by drawing attention to its darker side, particularly when managerial and social expectations surrounding voluntary extra-role contribution gradually make such behavior more difficult to refuse, giving rise to citizenship pressure. Although this informal pressure is increasingly suspected of heightening employees’ ethical vulnerability, the psychological processes through which this occurs remain theoretically fragmented. This integrative conceptual review addresses that fragmentation by synthesizing evidence from several related research streams and developing a dual-pathway conceptual process model that brings together resource depletion and resentment-based cognition to explain how citizenship pressure may lead to deviant behavior through moral disengagement. We argue that citizenship pressure weakens employees’ ethical regulation through two complementary routes. The first is an energetic pathway, grounded in Conservation of Resources theory and contemporary self-regulation perspectives, in which ethical vulnerability arises through diminished regulatory capacity. The second pathway is the relational pathway, which is more deliberate and interpretive, grounded in Social Exchange Theory and Neutralization Theory, in which ethical vulnerability develops through perceived exploitation and compensatory justification. The framework locates ethical vulnerability in two processes that may unfold at the same time. Citizenship pressure can drain employees’ self-regulatory resources while also fostering perceptions of exploitation and resentment. The framework proposes that these two pathways may operate in parallel, with each unfolding through a distinct sequential process toward moral disengagement. The framework’s central contribution is to distinguish two forms of ethical vulnerability under citizenship pressure: a capacity-based vulnerability in which employees become less able to sustain moral self-regulation and a permission-based vulnerability in which perceived exploitation makes misconduct easier to justify. The complete architecture has not yet been tested empirically and is proposed as a basis for subsequent empirical examination.