Job loss and job insecurity were among the topics that were of most concern as consequences of the worldwide spread of the coronavirus. Export-dependent economies and economies that rely on tourism have struggled adjusting to fluctuating and shifting demand. The World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) suggested that the global job market was at risk for 75 million people in 2020 [1], while the World Economic Forum reported that the lockdown and layoff practices during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in 114 million job losses in 2020 [2]. Even employees who survive the layoffs become anxious about their career and suffer high levels of job insecurity [3,4]. According to prior studies, job insecurity is a significant hindrance-related stress that negatively influence tourism business’s ability to achieve its desired work [4,5,6] and can lead to absenteeism and anxiety [7].

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and according to social cognitive theory, employees who face job insecurity in addition to increased family financial strain are more likely to use moral disengagement practices to disable moral self-regulation, resulting in increased levels of unethical behavior. Moreover, researchers asserted that the heavy losses suffered by business organizations created significant unethical organizational practice [3,8,9]. Approximately 90% of companies indicate that COVID-19 is a risk to ethical behavior at work, according to a report from Ernst and Young [10]. Similarly, in a survey conducted in India by Bhattacharyya [11] during the COVID-19 outbreak, many employees were found to be willing to engage in unethical behavior, such as falsifying records of customers (32%) and disclosing false information to their managers (29%).

Researchers have recently been interested in researching the reasons behind unethical practices during the COVID-19 pandemic and understanding the relationship with job loss and perceived job insecurity. For example, guided by appraisal theories of emotion, Hillebrandt and Barclay [4] argued that COVID-19 provokes anxiety and can drive employees to prioritize their self-interest and promote cheating behavior in workplace. Elshaer and Azazz [3] surveyed 650 employees working in the Egyptian tourism industry to explore the psychological process that would drive unethical organizational behaviors by employees who contend with job insecurity. They found that perceived job insecurity reduces job embeddedness, strengthens turnover intentions, and encourages unethical behavior.

In addition, previous studies asserted that employees who suffer from stresses due to workplace threats (e.g., job insecurity) may conduct UOB as a way to protect their gains and job assets [12,13]. Employees conducting unethical organization behavior (UOB) can also be driven by self-serving interest to acquire personal gains [14] or benefiting their organization or group [15] while benefiting themselves accordingly [16]. Based on behavioral ethics research, people can generally fail to make an objective assessment of the ethics of their behavior in the workplace [17], since their cognitive biases cause them to underestimate or ignore their unethical behavior. Elshaer et al. [18] added that often, employees do not make an explicit decision to act unethically but rather seek to convince themselves that there is nothing wrong with their behavior. In general, UOB can lead to devastating effects, such as significant financial losses, legal prosecutions, and corporate closures [19,20]. While even simple unethical behaviors in organizations can lead to significant hidden costs, tarnishing employee morale and damaging a company’s reputation [21].

Despite the thrive of behavioral ethics research, negative behavior displayed within organizations has such a wide scope that it is virtually not possible to explore within the scope of a few research projects [22], and various studied contexts are needed to unpack the drivers of UOB for mitigating resulting risks. Most previous research on unethical behavior in the workplace focus on unethical pro-organizational behavior (in the name of the company) [9] with little attention to unethical practices in the name of self-interest [22,23,24] or the family [2,25]. The prevalent unethical behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic [3] and their possible relations with job insecurity [2] have raised significant questions about the different forms of unethical organizational behavior (UOB) during crises, the possible psychological process that drive such practices, and how it can be mitigated. Therefore, to address this gap of research and based on theories of conservation of resources, social cognitive and behavioral ethics (i.e., the self-maintenance and bounded ethicality theories), the current study aims to further investigate the effect of job insecurity on unethical organizational behavior among employees amid the COVID-19 pandemic, using family financial pressure and family motivation as mediating variables. The results of this study, thus, extend prior research results on conditions that shape unethical practices in the workplace and better explain the widespread UOB during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also provides insights into how organizations can address ethical challenges.

Job insecurity has long been a subject of study in a wide variety of research papers [2,4,26,27]. Numerous studies have been conducted in the hotel and tourism industries, notably on job insecurity and its effect on human behavior [2,28]. Job insecurity is a “perceptual phenomenon” that focuses on a person’s current job stability threats [29]. Hellgren et al. [30] proposes two categories of job insecurity: quantitative “threats to the job as a whole” and qualitative “threats to desired job characteristics”. Quantitative job insecurity focuses on the expected job loss triggered by intentional or unintentional administrative signals or appraisal reports by employees’ supervisors, while qualitative job insecurity illustrates how an individual perceives their future job loss in light of a perceived threat [30].

Given the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy, downsizing has become a common strategy in recent years. Downsizing is a method of reducing labor costs, streamlining operations, and increasing organizational competitiveness [31]. According to [32,33], organizational restructuring and the downsizing process have proved to threaten workers and their careers, resulting in exacerbating perceived job insecurity [34]. The resulting stresses of perceived job instability may motivate employees to engage in unethical actions that they believe might protect them against the threat of job loss or even keep some important features of their job [23,35,36,37,38,39]. Unethical workplace behavior may include actions that benefit the organization, group or employee self-interest, such as diminishing colleagues’ efforts to improve personal relationships, reputations, and professional success [40]. Employees’ activities and behaviors that are in direct conflict with the organization’s norms and values may create significant financial losses [41] and jeopardize organizational image [42].

Employees as well as their families face financial difficulties as a result of the high percentage of job insecurity [43]. Despite remarkable advances in our understanding of the impact of job insecurity on well-being, stress, and health over the last several years [30,44], it is difficult to infer causality. Financial stress on the family (i.e., related to satisfying basic needs, family education cost, utilities payments, or family healthcare expenses) is likely to exacerbate job insecurity, which in turn leads to financial pressure [45,46]. A few research studies have explored the relationship between job insecurity and employees’ financial well-being and pressure and provide contradicting results between significant [47] and insignificant [45] effects. Therefore, the relationship between job insecurity and family financial pressure requires further investigation.

Families’ financial difficulties are not just felt by the impoverished; they are also felt by rich people who want to maintain pace with their friends. When confronted with strong financial difficulties from family members, an employee’s principal purpose is to relieve those pressures. The more pressing the need, the more significant this goal will become. Generally, supporting one’s family monetarily is a key worth in human culture [48]. Liu et al. [25] elaborated that social expectations are framed, and laws are laid out to uphold the satisfaction of familial monetary obligations. When stressed to assist their families, employees are bound to consider it to be their responsibility to make any strides important to help their family, subsequently obscuring their moral obligation regarding their actions.

Based on the theory of conservation of resources developed by Hobfoll [12], when people face a concern of losing their valuable resources, they become pressured to protect those resources by, for example, acquiring recuperation assets. Accordingly, when employees encounter substantial financial difficulties in their families, they are more likely to concentrate their efforts on obtaining financial compensation from their employer [46]. As a result, self-justification of immoral actions in the workplace can then thrive [49]. Unethical workplace activities may help alleviate the stress and aggravation felt by employees while simultaneously improving the financial well-being of the employees’ families. Many sorts of unethical behavior in the name of the family are directly linked to financial advantages that might relieve financial stress, such as bringing organization possessions home for use or accompanying relatives to the workplace to gain benefit from the organization’s resources.

According to the social cognitive theory proposed by Bandura [50] and the self-concept maintenance theory developed by Mazar et al. [51], the readiness of self-justifications encourages unethical behavior through an expanded moral disengagement. Self-justifications can make the UB looks less immoral; costs of the dishonest action are limited, disregarded, or confounded; or casualties of the wrongdoing are undervalued or accused. In summary, when family financial pressures are increased because of perceived job insecurity, employees may become more likely to participate in unethical workplace behavior to benefit their family and decrease these related stresses. Thus, the following hypotheses were proposed:

Supporting one’s family is a significant justification for why many people work, yet surprisingly few researchers have investigated the effects of family motivation [47], particularly in relation to perceived pressures and job insecurity. Moreover, Liu et al. [25] noted that no previous study has thoroughly examined the role of the family as a motivating factor for unethical behavior in organizations. Menges et al. ([47], p. 700) defines family motivation as “the desire to expend effort to benefit one’s family”. Prior research suggested that workers with a high family motive are more likely to prioritize family concerns and perceive the family’s best interests as a main consideration [25,46,48]. This would likely drive employees who place a high value on their families to justify immoral behavior in the workplace since it benefits them personally and socially as well as their own families [52,53].

Relatedly, previous studies [53,54,55] explained that employees ted to perceive their desire protect to benefit another party’s or beneficiaries’ interest (family members in this study) as a moral (ease-to-use) justification for unethical behavior. Based on the concept of bounded ethicality, an employee may often behave unethically as he/she either consciously or unconsciously was able to disregard and justify his/her own misconduct [30].