Unbureaucratic Behavior in Times of Crisis: Rule-Breaking by Public Administrators

Abstract

During crisis management, public administrators typically adjust bureaucratic rules to become more flexible. In this paper, we go one step further, asking about the factors that explain rule-breaking behavior among public servants during crisis management. We report novel qualitative evidence and findings from a preregistered randomized quasi-experiment surveyed among 448 public servants in Germany. Our findings reveal that bureaucrats’ prosocial attitudes, whether the affected population is part of their in-group and higher levels of red tape affect significantly their willingness to engage in rule-breaking. Effects from decisive leadership are weak and conditional on other explanatory factors. These findings provide valuable insights for theory and practice in crisis and human resource management, demonstrating that organizations have limited leverage in influencing whether their employees engage in rule-breaking behavior, which is, in the main, conditional on individual factors and the characteristics of the crisis.