When Distal Duty Prevails, Does Misconduct Follow? A Latent Profile Analysis of Confucian Duty Ethics and Cyberdeviant Behaviors

ABSTRACT Cyberdeviant behaviors refer to deviant information behaviors in digital environments. In organizational contexts, it specifically refers to employees' intentional actions that violate organizational norms regarding the seeking, sharing, producing, or use of information. Despite its significance, this phenomenon has received limited attention in Library and Information Science (LIS) research. This study adopts a mixed‐methods approach to examine how Confucian duty ethics shape cyberdeviant behaviors. Study 1 develops and validates a measurement scale capturing four dimensions of Confucian duty ethics. Study 2 employs Latent Profile Analysis to identify distinct user ethical profiles based on proximal and distal duties. Results reveal that employees characterized by strong distal but weak proximal duty are more likely to engage in cyberdeviant behaviors. This study contributes to LIS literature by introducing a culturally grounded ethical framework and highlighting the divergent roles of proximal and distal duties in shaping deviant information practices.