Studying the individual antecedents of pro-social rule breaking in the workplace (A case study at Tehran municipality)

Pro-social rule breaking and violation of the rules and policies is one of the organizational phenomenon, yet the employees’ breaking the organizational rules is not always self-interested. There are some instances where the employees intentionally violate a formal organizational policy or regulation with the primary intention of promoting the welfare of the organization or one of its stakeholders and as a result, this topic caused the organizational behavior scholars to identify the antecedents of such behavior within the work place. In this article we are looking for the individual antecedents of pro-social rule breaking. We pursue a quantitative approach in this article and our statistical population is the employees who work in the fourth regional office of Tehran municipality. We found that the likelihood of pro-social rule breaking was positively related to “risk-taking propensity” or the natural tendency to overestimate the likelihood of success when engaging in risky endeavors and “empathy” or the ability to understand and share the feelings of other people.