Beyond the mask: When face concerns lead to emotional exhaustion and workplace deception

Face, a culturally salient socio-psychological construct that motivates employees to protect and enhance their social image. However, this pursuit may inadvertently trigger unethical workplace deception behavior (WDB). While face encompasses both the desire to gain face and the fear of losing face, which respectively reflect distinct approach and avoidance motivations, its overall motivational roles and underlying mechanisms in the workplace remain insufficiently understood. Drawing upon impression management and conservation of resources theories, we conceptualize face as a unified socio-psychological resource that drives impression management and build a moderated mediation model to explore how face influences WDB via emotional exhaustion, and whether psychological resilience and self-efficacy act as boundary conditions. Data were gathered via a three-stage questionnaire survey from 389 current employees from Chinese enterprises, followed by empirical analysis. Face is positively and significantly associated with WDB; emotional exhaustion serves as a mediator in the association between face and WDB; psychological resilience attenuates the positive association between face and emotional exhaustion in the first stage, while self-efficacy attenuates the positive association between emotional exhaustion and WDB in the second stage; accordingly, each psychological resource attenuates the estimated indirect association between face and WDB via emotional exhaustion. This study provides empirical evidence for the face-WDB association in the Chinese cultural context, and highlights how individual psychological resources of resilience and self-efficacy attenuate this process in a stage-specific manner within a two-stage moderated mediation framework, contributing to a deeper understanding of unethical behavior in social contexts.