Managers love commitment, but they rarely ask what committed employees are willing to do for the company. Fulmore and colleagues show that in rule-driven or competitive cultures, loyalty becomes dangerous. Employees bend rules, falsify information, and protect the company—even when ethics are compromised.
The biggest mistake leaders make is believing that “high commitment” guarantees positive outcomes. Fulmore and colleagues prove the opposite: when an organization’s culture signals that winning matters more than integrity, committed employees become the greatest ethical risk. They don’t sabotage the firm; they protect it. And because they see themselves as loyal soldiers, they justify deception, concealment, or fraud as acts of service.
Look at Wells Fargo’s account-creation scandal. Employees didn’t fabricate accounts because they hated the company—they believed they were helping it achieve sales targets and organizational success. Volkswagen’s emissions deception grew out of a culture that prioritized engineering dominance and competitive position. In both cases, loyalty and performance pressure combined with rigid cultural norms.
Leaders should treat culture like infrastructure. You don’t fix ethical problems by tightening rules; you fix them by changing the system of values that tell employees “what winning looks like.” Flexibility-focused cultures—like those at Patagonia, Gore, or Southwest Airlines—create psychological safety, collaboration, and shared ownership. These settings reduce the impulse to cheat on behalf of the firm because integrity is a team norm, not a compliance requirement.
Managers should ask themselves: What implicit message does our culture send when performance is on the line? If the answer is “hit targets at all costs,” then UPB is not an anomaly—it is a feature of the system. The cure is not more compliance training. The cure is rebalancing culture toward flexibility, transparency, and collective accountability.
Based upon the Analysis Of: Fulmore, J. A., Nimon, K., & Reio, T. (2024). The role of organizational culture in the relationship between affective organizational commitment and unethical pro-organizational behavior. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 39(7), 845–862.