04-30-2026
When PhD applicants considered Tulane University and moving to New Orleans, they’d ask current PhD students like Elizabeth Umphress: “Is it safe?” As a loyal resident, she felt pulled in two directions — wanting to reassure them, so they invest in the city she loved, yet also wanting to be honest. She gave up on her stock answer — “It’s no more dangerous than any other big city” — when she began to consider her research on ethical behavior.
Today Umphress is a professor of management at the University of Washington in Seattle. She visited the Daniels School in April and presented on unethical prosocial behavior as part of the Center for Working Well’s Distinguished Speaker Series.
In organizations, leaders face similar questions every day: Is my city safe? Is my team performing? Is my colleague really ready for promotion? The temptation is to shade the truth to protect a coworker, team or organization we care about. That is where unethical prosocial behavior begins.
Umphress defines unethical prosocial behavior as actions that break rules or ethical norms in order to benefit another person, team or organization. Think of a manager who inflates a teammate’s performance review to secure their bonus, an employee who hides a defect to protect the firm’s quarterly results, or a basketball player who fouls to benefit their team.
In each case, the intent is prosocial — to help someone or serve a collective goal — but the means are unethical. These behaviors can temporarily boost performance metrics, maintain team harmony, or protect reputations, which is why they are so seductive. But they also plant seeds of distorted data, misplaced trust and future risk.
Umphress notes that unethical prosocial behavior is difficult to study precisely because it wears the disguise of loyalty and care. Employees often don’t label it as unethical; they experience it as “being a good teammate” or “having your boss’ back.”
That means:
The behavior often happens in gray zones — softening numbers, selective reporting, and “forgetting” to mention bad news — rather than perceiving it as fraud.
Organizations sometimes reward the outcomes (hitting targets, securing clients), making it even harder to disentangle performance from ethical cost.
Umphress’ work surfaces these patterns by teasing apart motive, method, and beneficiary: Are you breaking an ethical norm? For whose benefit? And at whose expense, now or later?
In the short term, unethical prosocial behavior can look like a performance win:
But Umphress’ research highlights the long-term costs:
What feels like a short-term fix becomes a long-term drag on performance, trust and culture.
Umphress’ work points leaders toward solutions that protect both performance and integrity:
First, redefine “helping.” Make it explicit that real prosocial behavior includes telling uncomfortable truths, surfacing risks early, and protecting the long-term health of the organization. Second, reward candor, not just outcomes. Build systems that recognize people who raise red flags, not only those who deliver flawless metrics. Third, broaden the circle of concern. Encourage employees to consider stakeholders beyond the immediate team — customers, future colleagues and the community — when making tough calls. Finally, equip people with scripts and safeguards. Provide language and processes for pushing back on requests that feel “off,” so individuals aren’t left alone to navigate ethical gray areas.
Leaders and managers need to shift the culture from “protect my people at all costs” to “protect my people by protecting the integrity of our system.” That’s the kind of performance culture Purdue’s Center for Working Well is seeking to advance — one where care and ethics reinforce, rather than undermine, long-term success.
Unethical prosocial behavior arises when we break rules to help someone we care about — our city, our colleague, our team, our firm. The behavior may create the perception of short-term performance gains but long-term damage to trust, data quality, well-being and real performance costs.
Because they feel like loyalty, unethical prosocial behaviors are hard to see, hard to admit and hard to study. Leaders can respond by reframing helping, rewarding candor, broadening stakeholder focus and giving people tools to navigate ethical gray zones.
Watch Umphress’ April 17 talk in the Daniels School’s Rawls Hall:
Purdue’s Center for Working Well (CWW) is at the forefront of challenges facing modern workforces and employees’ desire to “work well.” Through research, events, courses and partnerships, the center’s staff and faculty affiliates seek to develop a robust understanding of what “working well” means to employees and organizations. Explore CWW events and the center’s research blog.
