Two faces of good deals: A third-party perspective on perceived coworker I-deals

To win the talent war, companies offer valuable employees customized employment arrangements. These idiosyncratic deals (i-deals), while confidential, may elicit diverse reactions from the recipients' colleagues. We propose a contextual cue-focused dual-path contingency model suggesting that employees perceive and react to coworker i-deals through either a self-improvement or an image-enhancement path. Specifically, when perceiving a merit-based system, individuals will engage in personal thriving to improve themselves, resulting in constructive outcomes. Alternatively, if they perceive their supervisors as having low integrity, they are likely to engage in leader-targeted impression management, which can lead to unfavorable outcomes. In the pilot study, 98 employees participated in a scenario-based study to test hypotheses. The main study was a time-lagged field study involving 219 dyads of employees and their supervisors. Our results show that perceiving coworkers' i-deals can prompt employees' proactive responses with different motives and strategies, depending on the contextual cues they extract. Based on the findings, we discuss theoretical contributions as well as practical implications.