Desperate Times, Desperate Measures: Exploring the Dark Side of Job Embeddedness During COVID-19 Pandemic

Drawing upon the conservation of resource (COR) theory, the purpose of the article is to explore how the two dimensions of job insecurity, that is, quantitative, and qualitative insecurity relate to unethical pro-organisational behaviour (UPB). The study further aims to investigate if job embeddedness moderates the relationship between two forms of insecurity and UPB. The hypotheses were tested with three wave survey data collected from 354 employees during the period of strict lockdown in India when all the employees were working from home. The main and interaction effects were analysed with regression analysis on PROCESS v 3.0 macro. Quantitative job insecurity was seen to influence UPB positively, whereas no significant relation was found between qualitative insecurity and UPB. The two dimensions of job insecurity and UPB were moderated by job embeddedness such that the association was greater for employees who were more embedded. The results point towards the 'dark side' of embeddedness which may have deleterious effects for the organisation in the form of UPB.