Social Norms in Organizations: An Expansive View of Conformity and Deviance in the Workplace

Norms are ubiquitous in organizations (Dannals & Miller, 2017a). Injunctive norms (how people ought to behave) and descriptive norms (how most people actually behave) are powerful influences on employee decision making, perceptions, and behavior (Cialdini, Reno & Kallgren, 1990). Research on social norms has burgeoned in the past decade, illuminating myriad organizationally-relevant findings. This symposium aims to deepen scholarship on the myriad ways in which norms influence employee perceptions and behavior in the workplace. Employing a combination of methods, the papers in this symposium examine a host of salient questions surrounding social norms and norms violations at work, with specific attention to normative influences on honesty, trustworthiness, moral behavior, rule-breaking, and leadership perception.