Abstract

This study investigated in what context and climate employees engage in cut-corner behavior. Cut-corner is an organizational behavior aimed at reducing the use of individual or organizational resources by being flexible within one’s own standards. In this study, we focused on the pressure employees feel on their work and the perceived competition with colleagues. We primarily examined the effect of work overload as a major factor influencing cut-corner behavior. We also tested that promotion regulatory focus as individual variable and psychological competition as contextual factor that have interaction effects to cut-corner. We further examined that counterproductive climate as an environmental factor, and applied a multi-level methodology using reference-shift composition model from the counterproductive behavior. For analyses, We used data collected from 141 people from 37 teams of various organizations. As a result of the analysis, it was found that the work overload has a positive effects on the cut-corner. The promotion regulatory focus has no significant interaction effect between work overload and cut-corner, whereas the three-way interaction with psychological competitive (work overload × promotion regulatory focus × psychological competition) has significant effect. Cross-level analysis found significant interaction effects between work overload and counterproductive climate on cut-corner behavior. Implications and suggestions for future research were provided based on the findings.