Regret and repair: from coworker undermining to organizational citizenship behavior

Unethical interpersonal interactions such as coworker undermining has been a major issue in organizations as they add stress to the workplace and make it unappealing for others. The extant research focused on the victim’s perspective; however, actor’s perspective has been overlooked so far. Based on the social identity theory (SIT), we focused on the actor’s perspective and investigated how coworker undermining transforms into organizational citizenship behavior towards individuals (OCBI). By doing so, we introduced the actor’s regret as a key mediating mechanism to explain the interactive effects of coworker undermining and organizational identity (OI) on OCBI (i.e., the mediated moderation model). The findings, based on time-lagged, dyadic data (N = 31 supervisors and 400 employees) from the textile sector, in Pakistan showed that high-OI employees who engaged in coworker undermining behavior realize their fault and are regretful for their offense, this regret then leads them to exhibit OCBI. This study contributes to the undermining and OCB literature by focusing on the actors’ perspectives.