| Summary: | Peixu He,1 Jun Wang,1 Hanhui Zhou,1 Qiyuan Liu,1 Muhammad Zada2,3 1Business School, Huaqiao University, Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, 362021, People’s Republic of China; 2Facultad de Administración y Negocios, Universidad Autónoma de Chile, Santiago, 8320000, Chile; 3Department of Management Science and Commerce, Alhamd Islamic University, Islamabad, 45400, PakistanCorrespondence: Muhammad Zada, Facultad de Administración y Negocios, Universidad Autónoma de Chile, Santiago, Chile, 8320000, Email muhammed.zada@uautonoma.clPurpose: This study investigates the association between the previous workplace ostracism of employees and their subsequent helping behavior by drawing on moral cleansing theory in the Chinese context, exploring the mediating roles of employees’ guilt and perceived loss of moral credit and the moderating role of their moral identity symbolization.Sample and Method: The data were collected from a two-stage time-lagged survey of 284 Chinese employees. Regression analysis and the bootstrapping method are used in this article to examine the theoretical hypotheses.Results: The results indicate that employees’ previous ostracism behaviors positively affected their guilt experience and perceived loss of moral credit. Subsequently, the relationship between employees’ workplace ostracism and their helping behavior is mediated by guilt experience and perceived loss of moral credit. Furthermore, moral identity symbolization positively moderated the indirect “workplace ostracism-helping behavior” linkage via guilt and perceived loss of moral credits; in other words, for employees who have a higher degree of moral identity symbolization, the mediating effect is more significant, and vice versa.Conclusion: This study does not merely clarify the theoretical relationship between perpetrators’ workplace ostracism and their helping behavior, which enriches the explanatory logic of related research on workplace ostracism and the cause of helping behavior, but also expand the application scope of moral cleansing theory. Further, we aim practically to bring enlightenment to human resource management reform, corporate culture construction, and positive behavior management.Keywords: workplace ostracism, helping behavior, moral cleansing, guilt experience, perceived loss of moral credits, moral identity symbolization
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