Employees high in narcissism tend towards unethical behavior but can the goals of narcissists be influenced by contextual factors such that narcissistic employees behave no different regarding ethics from other employees? Utilizing communal versus agentic motive theory, we test the moderating role of long-term orientation and ethical work climate on the effect of narcissism to unethical behavior via moral disengagement. We test our hypotheses using a time-lagged experimental design with a sample size of 644 participants. We find that high long-term orientation and high ethical climate attenuate the positive indirect effect of narcissism on unethical behavior through moral disengagement. In other words, highly narcissistic individuals behave similar to less narcissistic individuals when they have a long-term orientation and are exposed to communal motives through an ethical work climate. This work contributes to the unethical behavior literature by identifying factors that may attenuate the negative effects of narcissism and the individual differences literature by challenging the commonly held belief that narcissists are only short-term motivated.
