Why do Employees Engage in Workplace Cheating Behavior in Remote Work?

Abstract

Abstract: Today, organizations are facing serious ethical challenges in drastic environmental changes. Especially in remote work, organizations are always worried about whether they will be deceived by their employees. It seems that employees have more opportunities to cheat their organization, due to the work environment change resulting from remote work. Therefore, this study attempts to use a grounded theory approach to illustrate why employees' cheating behavior is increasing in remote work and address this by analyzing an online open-ended survey from 100 employees. The results indicate that employees' cheating behavior has new causes (i.e. slack and withdrawal) and new motivations (i.e. protecting life and team interests). In addition, this study constructs a new framework based on the theory of personal-environment fit to explain employees' cheating behavior in remote work. This framework reveals the mechanism by which selfdemand and organizational requirements influence employees' cheating behavior through work state from the perspective of needssupplies and demands-abilities misfit and the boundary role of the organizational justice climate. The above results will help managers better understand why and when employees cheat their organization when working remotely, and provide valuable implications for organizations to improve management in remote work.

Key words: remote work, cheating behavior, personal-environment fit, grounded theory approach

Yang Yang, Yan Rui, Zou Mingyang, Meng Yan. Why do Employees Engage in Workplace Cheating Behavior in Remote Work?[J]. Management Review, 2025, 37(5): 157-167.

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