Critical to top management’s organizing efforts are the formal rules for how organizational members are to make decisions. However, employees can break top management’s decision‐making rules. Although scholars have investigated rule breaking at the individual and group levels of analysis, research is needed into how members come together as a group to break an organization’s decision‐making rules, and how groups’ rule breaking persists. To address this important research gap, we draw from a real‐time qualitative investigation of both the breaking and following of decision‐making rules to develop a group model that: (1) explains how an individual can trigger his or her group to break decision‐making rules to generate perceived benefits for the group and/or others external to the organization, (2) provides insights into the mechanisms by which rule breaking persists, and (3) highlights the norms of developing and perpetuating groups’ breaking decision‐making rules. © 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.