Groups are widely utilized to organize people toward collective goals (Kozlowski and Ilgen, 2006). In the course of goal pursuit, there are usually multiple groups striving for incompatible goals (e.g., companies compete for market share, football teams compete for championship). One’s progress in attaining desired outcomes decreases others’ probability of goal attainment, so group members in this context will be motivated to gain or maintain advantages (Deutsch, 1949; Pruitt, 1998; De Dreu, 2010; Garcia et al., 2013).

Competition not only can promote competitiveness, leading to improved group performance (Pike et al., 2018), but also can provoke unethical behavior (Goette et al., 2012; Bennett et al., 2013; Kilduff et al., 2016). Although group-based competition are pervasive in human society, empirical research examining unethical behavior in this context is still limited. The present research hereby explores whether unethical behavior in group-based competition differs from that in individual-based competition, and tries to reveal how social bonding in groups affects individuals’ unethical behavior.

Competition is interaction processes in which individuals vie for goals or resources, with one party’s goal pursuit impeding another party’s goal striving (Deutsch, 1949).

Engaging in competition may entail increased physiological arousal (Neave and Wolfson, 2003; To et al., 2018), result in risk-taking behaviors (To et al., 2018) and heightened motivation to outperform their opponents (Yip et al., 2018).

When individuals are outperformed by opponents, such experience may hurt their identity (Aquino and Douglas, 2003; Leavitt and Sluss, 2015) and give rise to discouragement and lowered self-satisfaction (Bandura, 1991). According to social learning perspective, individuals in this situation would apply their moral standards more leniently (Bandura, 1999; Sharma et al., 2014) and tend to morally disengage from self-regulation (Bandura, 1991, 1999). Thus the situation of being disadvantageous would inflame unethical impulse, triggering unethical behaviors aiming at gaining advantage (Pierce et al., 2013). Based on the above reasoning, we could expect an enhanced value competition losers would place on retaining advantages, leading to an increase in unethical behavior, as compared to winners.

Individuals have the innate need to affiliate with social groups (Baumeister and Leary, 1995), and to identify with their groups (Tajfel, 1982; Ashforth and Mael, 1989). In group-based competition contexts, because individuals are concerned about their relative group outcomes, they are apt to participate in unethical behaviors toward competitors to maintain group advantage (Halevy et al., 2010; Goette et al., 2012). Unethical behaviors targeting at improving group interests rather than the self are coined pro-group unethical behaviors (Thau et al., 2015) and unethical pro-organizational behavior (Umphress and Bingham, 2011). Such unethical behaviors have been consistently observed in recent studies (Molinsky and Margolis, 2005; Gino and Pierce, 2009; Umphress et al., 2010; Umphress and Bingham, 2011; Shalvi and De Dreu, 2014; Thau et al., 2015; Chen et al., 2016; Fehr et al., 2019; Jiang et al., 2022). It is suggested that individuals conduct pro-group unethical behaviors with the purpose of being included by their groups (Thau et al., 2015) or maintaining exchange relationship with their groups (Umphress et al., 2010; Umphress and Bingham, 2011).

In many work groups, task jointness and coordination produce a sense of shared responsibility which fosters affective ties to groups (Thye et al., 2019), promote ingroup cohesiveness (Deutsch, 1949; Stein, 1976; Tajfel and Turner, 1979) and cooperation (Erev et al., 1993; Bornstein et al., 2002). Individual members embedded in such cohesive relational network act as valuable resources to each other, as their interactions consist of such features as mutual aid, reciprocal norms, and interpersonal trust that enable individuals to act together effectively to pursue collective goals (Putnam, 1993). According to Bandura’s social cognitive theory (Bandura, 2000), the interdependence of individual member functioning and members’ shared beliefs in their collective power to produce effects provide a basis for the development of collective efficacy belief—belief in the collective power to produce desired outcomes (Gibson, 1999; Bandura, 2000; Kozlowski and Ilgen, 2006). This belief has positive impact on psychological wellbeing. For instance, it associates with resilience to impediments and setbacks (Bandura, 2000), serves as buffer of stressor-strain relations (Jex and Bliese, 1999; Tucker et al., 2013; Esnard and Roques, 2014), and reduces anxiety (Salanova et al., 2003). Thus collective efficacy belief developed in group-based competition is helpful in buffering stress produced in individuals’ interaction with rivals, leading to a more benign appraisal of stressful events in competitive interaction (e.g., group-based disadvantage), as suggested by previous literature (Kawachi and Berkman, 2001).

On the other hand, individuals like to think of themselves as moral, so conducts that are in line with their moral standards build their sense of self-worth, whereas behaving in ways that violate their moral standards are detrimental to their self-worth and may cause self-condemnation (Bandura, 1999). Since individuals who engage in joint tasks can count on other group members’ expertise and efforts, collective efficacy belief would have the effect of mitigating individuals’ impulse to behave in ways that will violate their moral standards in group-based competitions. Indeed, recent work suggests that individuals sometimes are aversive to unethical behavior when it advances their own interests because they want to maintain their positive view of self-concept (Mazar et al., 2008; Mead et al., 2009; Shalvi et al., 2011a,b).

Therefore, group-based competitions would have differential impact on behaviors, as compared to individual-based competitions where outcomes are solely determined by personal performance. We could expect a mitigated motivation to behave unethically in group-based competitions, compared with that in individual-based competitions, and a negative association between collective efficacy belief and unethical behavior in group-based competitions.

To test the hypotheses, the present study focused on unethical behavior after winning or losing a competition. Study 1 and 2 are laboratory experiments in which participants were assigned into groups of three members and engaged in group-based competitions (or individual-based competitions in an individual context) with monetary incentives. Participants were instructed to engage in two consecutive competitions with the same competitor, namely repeated team-based competition (RTB) or repeated individual-based competition (RIB). In Study 1, winning or losing outcome was determined by participants’ true performances. The authors compared unethical behaviors between the winning and the losing conditions and between the RTB and the RIB. In Study 2, participants were randomly assigned to a winning or a losing condition. The purposes of Study 2 were to replicate findings in Study 1, and test the relationship between collective efficacy and pro-group unethical behavior. Study 3 was a survey study with employees from bank subsidiaries working as teams, to garner empirical evidence for ecological validity of our conclusions.

Past decades have witnessed a growing body of research contributing to our knowledge about the antecedents and consequences of unethical behavior (Treviño, 1986; Ford and Richardson, 1994; O’Fallon and Butterfield, 2005; Tenbrunsel and Smith-Crowe, 2008; Bazerman and Gino, 2012; Treviño et al., 2014). However, empirical research examining unethical behavior in group-based competitions is limited. The present research provides insights concerning how and why group-based competition experiences shape members’ unethical behavior. We showed that there are less unethical behaviors in the group-based competition than in the individual-based competition, and that collective efficacy has the effect of curbing unethical behavior in group-based competition.

Our studies make the following theoretical contributions to literature: Research suggests that goal settings can stimulate unethical behavior (Ordóñez et al., 2009), particularly when people fail in attaining their goals (Schweitzer et al., 2004). Our studies confirmed this goal-induced unethical behaviors in individual-based competition, and more importantly, we shed further light on psychological constraints (i.e., collective efficacy belief) on unethical behavior in group-based competitions. Our research also contributes to competition and rivalry literature (Kilduff et al., 2010). Our behavioral experiments consist of two consecutive competitions, each with a winning and a losing outcome. This repeated competitive relationship is consistent to the defining feature of rivalry (Kilduff et al., 2010). Existing literature suggests that rivalries boost unethical behaviors (Kilduff et al., 2010). Our findings suggest that loss in a group-based competition did not result in more unethical behaviors as compared to the winning condition. Thus we provide new knowledge about how group-based rivalry influences individuals’ unethical behaviors.

In two behavioral experiments, we observed that losers in the individual-based competition were more intended to behave unethically as compared to winners. Few study has aimed at revealing how competition loss (vs. win) might affect unethical behavior. Our study is consistent with a related stream of research showing that individual-level financial deprivation (Kern and Chugh, 2009; Reinders Folmer and De Cremer, 2012; Sharma et al., 2014) and perceived payment inequity (Greenberg, 1990, 2002; Gino and Pierce, 2009, 2010a,2010b; Houser et al., 2012; John et al., 2014) lead to maleficent acts. Both competition loss and relative deprivation are forms of goal failure that may lead to heightened motive to restore advantages among those who are falling behind (Locke and Latham, 1990). These individuals tend to place greater significance on competition outcomes, leading to eager styles of goal pursuit (Kilduff, 2014; Converse and Reinhard, 2016; Kilduff and Galinsky, 2017) and unethical acts aiming at outperforming their opponents (Kilduff et al., 2016; Kim and Guinote, 2021). Thus our finding is consistent with goal-induced unethical behavior observed in prior studies (Schweitzer et al., 2004; Ordóñez et al., 2009; Welsh and Ordóñez, 2014).

In Study 1 and 2, different from the individual-based competition, we found that loss (vs. win) in the group-based competition did not lead to more unethical behaviors in a subsequent group-based competition. However, it is unclear whether experiencing a group-based competition would affect unethical behavior in favor of personal benefits in a subsequent individual-based competition. Therefore, we conducted a follow-up experiment in which all participants engaged in a team-based competition, followed by an individual-based competition in which each participant competed with an individual from the competing team. Experimental protocol was identical to the one used in Study 2 with the following exception: The first competition (cognitive task) was a team-based competition and the second one was an individual-based competition in which each participant competed with an individual from the competing team. We speculated that losers in the first competitive task (the team-based competition) are more unethical than winners in the consecutive individual-based competition. A total of 64 students (47% male; M_age = 19.69, SD_age = 1.42) were randomly assigned to a losing (N = 32) or a winning (N = 32) condition. The experiment was a between-subjects design. The number of idioms participants over-reported in the losing condition (M_loss = 2.13, SD = 2.550) was larger than those in the winning condition [M_win = 0.84, SD = 1.273, F_{(1, 62)} = 6.469, p = 0.013, η_p² = 0.094]. This result confirmed our speculation and suggest that group-based competition experience did not alter unethical behavior for the personal interests in the individual-based competition.

Competitions and rivalries are ubiquitous in organizational life, but it is far from clear how group-based competition processes influence employees’ unethical behaviors. Some literature points to the relation between perceived loafing and lesser effort in groups (Schnake, 1991; Mulvey and Klein, 1998; Heuzé and Brunel, 2003), while other literature suggests that engaging in group-based competitions or rivalries may promote members’ intrinsic motivation in group tasks (Tauer and Harackiewicz, 2004), motivating their cooperation with partners (Erev et al., 1993; Bornstein et al., 2002; De Cremer and van Dijk, 2002), and improving group performance (Mulvey and Ribbens, 1999; Kilduff et al., 2010; Pike et al., 2018). Our research suggests that collective efficacy belief developed in group-based competition would increase members’ confidence in achieving good performance, and such collective efficacy belief would have the effect of inhibiting unethical behaviors. Thus managers could use techniques (e.g., team-based incentives) to promote employees’ collective efficacy.

The present study has some limitations: Our research did not answer how intensity of competition affects unethical behaviors. Cartwright and Menezes (2014) interestingly showed in their experiment that competition intensity at medium level is more likely to produce unethical behavior. It is far from clear the mechanism underlying their finding, thus future research could devote to exploring how and why different levels of competitions intensity would influence unethical behaviors, especially in group-based competitions. Another limitation relates to the fact that our research did not consider whether degree of similarity between current competitive interactions and past ones would affect unethical behavior. Rivalry relational schemata develop from past competitive experience, and high degree of similarity between current competitive interactions and past ones will facilitate the activation of rivalry relational schema, and will evoke unethical behaviors to gain advantages (Kilduff, 2014; Converse and Reinhard, 2016). Future research can manipulate degree of similarity to see how it influences unethical behaviors.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

The studies involving humans were approved by the Nanjing Xiaozhuang University Institutional Review Board. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

YZ: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft. LZ: Methodology, Data curation, Writing – review and editing. YH: Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing – review and editing.