Category Archives: Counter-Productive Work Behavior
Workplace Exclusion: The Return of Steve
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Bad Behavior At Work: Are Managers Asking For It? (IO Psychology)
Topic: Counter-Productive Work Behavior, Leadership, Job Performance
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (January, 2013)
Article: Blaming the Organization for Abusive Supervision: The Roles of Perceived Organizational Support and Supervisor’s Organizational Embodiment
Authors: M.K. Shoss, R. Eisenberger, S.L.D. Restubog, T.J. Zagenczyk
Reviewed By: Ben Sher, M.A.
Counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs) occur when employees do things that go against organizational goals. For example, stealing, bullying, unnecessary absence, swivel chair racing, beer pong in the break room, and assaulting the copy machine with a baseball bat when it is out of toner are all classified as counterproductive work behaviors. I-O psychology research has typically tried to predict which type of person will engage in these devious behaviors. However, a recent study by Shoss, et al. (2013) has found that certain organizations may also be causing an increase in bad behavior.
What do organizations do that leads to these detrimental outcomes? The study found that abusive supervision by bosses is to blame. Abusive supervision occurs when managers belittle their employees or treat them badly. When this happens, employees have lower perception of organizational support, meaning employees do not feel that the organization cares about them or values their contributions. The feeling that the organization doesn’t care was exacerbated when employees think that the abusive supervisor embodies the entire organization’s attitudes about employees, and is not merely driven by independent personal motives.
So if abusive supervision makes employees believe the organization does not care about them, what happens then? Employees may choose to engage in behavior that is counterproductive to the organization as a means of revenge against the organization. The study also found that job performance may decrease. This includes lower performance for parts of the job that are formally included in job requirements (in-role performance) as well as parts of the job that are not included in job requirements (extra-role performance). Once again, when employees perceive that the abusive supervisor embodies the entire organization, these findings were all strengthened.
What can we learn from this? Organizations that want to reduce counterproductive work behavior and improve their employees’ performance should not view these outcomes as being entirely dependent on the employees. Organizations play a large role in fostering the kind of behavior that they seek. This study highlights the detriments of abusive supervision, especially when it appears that the supervisor who delivers the abuse is representing the organization as a whole. For best results, leaders should strive to emphasize that abuse is not valued by the organization and that abusive supervisors will not be tolerated.
human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management
source for picture: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/Business_People_g201-Stressed_Man_Portrait_Isolated_On_White_Background_p76018.html
Should Leaders Care About the Work or the Workers? How About Both?!
Topic: Leadership, Counter-Productive Work Behavior
Publication: Journal of Organizational Behavior (in press)
Article: Effects of Leadership Consideration and Structure on Employee Perceptions of Justice and Counterproductive Work Behavior
Authors: Brian C. Holtz & Crystal M. Harold
Reviewed By: Thaddeus Rada
Although research on a variety of leadership “types,” such as charismatic and visionary leaders, has flourished in recent years, there has also been a return to a basic distinction that was made in the leadership literature many years ago: the distinction between consideration and initiating structure. Consideration refers to leaders’ “people-oriented” behaviors, such as showing respect for followers and facilitating group cohesiveness. Initiating structure refers to clarifying roles, establishing rules, and providing a framework for effective group and individual performance. These dimensions are not mutually exclusive, and some leaders may be high on both, others low on both, and still others high on one and low on the other. With interest in these dimensions increasing, a recent study examined them in relation to two important outcomes: employee perceptions of justice, and counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs).
Across two studies using multi-source data, the authors found that both consideration and structure were related to organizational justice in important ways; specifically, structure and distributive justice were strongly related, as were consideration and interpersonal justice. In addition, the authors found that, when consideration was low, higher levels of structure were associated with an increase in CWBs in the workplace.
These findings suggest that, while both consideration and structure are important for understanding leadership, what may be most important is the combination of these dimensions that a leader possesses. As interest in these leadership dimensions continues to return, it is likely that we will gain additional knowledge about how these dimensions interact with a variety of important outcomes.
human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management
Are you being treated badly by coworkers? It might just be affecting your home life (IO Psychology)
Topic: Counter-Productive Work Behavior, Work-Life Balance, Stress
Publication: Journal of Organizational Behavior (MAY 2012)
Article: You cannot leave it at the office: Spillover and crossover of coworker incivility
Authors: M. Ferguson
Reviewed by: Alexandra Rechlin
Do you have a coworker who is rude to you? Ignores you? Is condescending to you? If so, that’s called coworker incivility and it is probably not only affecting your satisfaction with and performance at work, but also your home life.
In a recent study, Meredith Ferguson investigated if and how coworker incivility affects the marital satisfaction of both the target of workplace incivility and the target’s partner. She was also interested in the role that stress might play in the spillover effects from coworker incivility.
Ferguson collected data from 190 workers and their partners. She found that coworker incivility led to stress that transferred to the family domain; both the target and the target’s partner reported lower levels of marital satisfaction due to the extra stress. The target’s partner also experienced more family-to-work conflict, probably because the partner was taking on more responsibilities to help alleviate the stress of the target.
From an organizational perspective, several implications from this research should be noted. In addition to poor organizational outcomes (e.g., lower work satisfaction, absenteeism), coworker incivility can also lead to negative effects for the target’s home life. In turn, having work-to-family conflict can lead to family-to-work conflict; in other words, negative spillover from workplace incivility may spill back to the organization. Therefore, organizations should take coworker incivility seriously, explain unacceptable behavior, and actively discourage it. They also could provide employee assistance programs for employees who are suffering stress from coworker incivility so that spillover and negative outcomes are reduced.
human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management
Predicting someone’s propensity to morally disengage (IO Psychology)
Topic: Assessment, Personality, Ethics, Counter-Productive Work Behavior, Workplace Deviance
Publication: Personnel Psychology (SPRING 2012)
Article: Why employees do bad things: Moral disengagement and unethical organizational behavior
Authors: Celia Moore, James R. Detert, Linda Klebe Treviño, Vicki L. Baker, & David M. Mayer
Reviewed by: Alexandra Rechlin
Organizations obviously want their employees to be ethical. While there are existing measures that are used to predict who will act immorally, the authors of this paper proposed a new construct that they called an individual’s propensity to morally disengage – an individual difference in how people think about ethical decisions and behavior that allows them to act unethically without feeling bad about it.
Celia Moore and her colleagues developed a measure of an individual’s propensity to morally disengage. In a series of studies, they then validated the measure for working adults by showing that the propensity to morally disengage was positively related to unethical behavior after accounting for a number of other related traits, orientations, and emotions. Predicted outcomes included self-, supervisor-, and coworker-reported unethical behavior, decisions to commit fraud, and self-serving decisions in the workplace.
You may be wondering how this paper is relevant to practitioners. This new measure of the propensity to morally disengage predicts unethical behavior, and it is short – it only includes eight items. While it has yet to be validated for employee selection, this measure certainly shows promise for its ability to predict unethical behavior. The authors also found that this measure had a low correlation with social desirability, so it seems to be fairly resistant to test-takers faking their responses to receive a good score. If your organization is using a lengthy integrity test in the selection process for the sole purpose of predicting those who would conduct unethical behavior, then this new measure may be something your organization might want to consider using instead.
human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management
Predicting CWBs: Have We Been Measuring the Wrong Things?
Topic: Counter-Productive Work Behavior, Personality
Publication: Personnel Psychology, 64, 2 (Summer 2011)
Article: Reconsidering the Dispositional Basis of Counterproductive Work Behavior: The Role of Aberrant Personality
Authors: Wu, J. & Lebreton, J. M.
Reviewed By: Thaddeus Rad
Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) remains a heavily-researched area in I-O psychology. CWBs can take a variety of forms, from relatively minor acts of workplace theft to dramatic outbursts of workplace violence. Regardless of who they target or how severe they might be, CWBs are always a negative phenomenon, and organizations have a vested interest in predicting the likelihood that employees (or applicants) might engage in these behaviors. Traditionally, work linking personality characteristics to CWBs has been done using common personality frameworks, such as the Big 5. However, previous research has generated mixed findings in terms of how well these “common” personality traits predict CWBs. As such, Wu and Lebreton suggest that it may be more effective to attempt to predict an individual’s likelihood of engaging in CWBs by measuring aberrant personality profiles. In their paper, Wu and Lebreton theoretically examine the links between CWBs and a number of aberrant personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.
With an eye towards future research, the authors posit a number of hypotheses about the link between these three aberrant personality profiles and CWBs, including that individuals high in narcissism would be particularly likely to perceive hostile behaviors from others, and that primary psychopaths would engage in more thoroughly-planned CWBs.
The title of this review is posed as a question, and at least for now, it remains an open question. However, this appears to be a fruitful area for research. There is no doubt that CWBs remain a topic of great importance to organizations, and in this author’s opinion, the potential that measuring aberrant personality features has for improving prediction of CWBs is well worth exploring.
Is Bad Behavior from an Employee the Consequence of an Unfulfilled Organizational Promise?
Topic: Counter-Productive Work Behavior, Fairness, Trust, Workplace Deviance
Publication: Journal of Business and Psychology (WINTER 2010)
Article: Psychological contracts and counterproductive work behaviors: employee responses to transactional and relational breach
Authors: J.M. Jensen, R.A. Opland, and A.M. Ryan
Reviewed By: Allison B. Siminovsky
Counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs) are those actions undertaken by the employee that are detrimental to the overall work environment. The reasons for engaging in such behaviors and the means of expressing them differ from situation to situation, and as a result it can be difficult for organizations to pinpoint exactly what the causes of CWBs may be. This article seeks to find antecedents for CWBs in organizational breaches of the psychological contract, or the employee’s inherent expectations about how the reciprocal relationship between employer and employee ought to be. In other words, does deviant workplace behavior result from perceived organizational injustices and mistreatment?
The current study examines the possibility of numerous types of CWBs occurring as the result of a perceived breach of the psychological contract and achieved several significant findings. For example, it was found that when employees are moved to retaliate to feeling a lost sense of their employers caring about them, they are most likely to engage in abuse behaviors, which include threatening and undermining one’s co-workers.
What Does Organizational Tenure Really Buy You?
Topic: Citizenship Behaviors, Counter-Productive Work Behavior, Job Performance
Publication: Journal
of Management (SEP)
Article: Organizational tenure and job performance
Authors: T.W.H.
Ng and D.C. Feldman
Reviewed By: Benjamin Granger
It is
often intuited that employees who remain in an organization longer gain more
knowledge of their job and the organization and thus perform at a higher level
than employees with less tenure.
Indeed, it’s no secret that organizational tenure is common factor
considered in administrative decisions such as offering promotions and awarding
raises and other fringe benefits (e.g., pensions, vacation days). For many of us, anecdotal evidence
probably confirms the assumption that as tenure within the organization
increases, so does performance.
But what does the research say?
In a recent
meta-analysis of the relationship between organizational tenure and job
performance, Ng and Feldman (2010) combined data from 350 studies which
included nearly 250,000 research participants. Not surprisingly, the authors expected that organizational
tenure would be favorably related to various forms of job performance. Their findings generally confirmed that
organizational tenure is favorably
associated with performance. However,
the relationships between tenure and performance was quite weak overall.
While
there was modest positive association between organizational tenure and task
performance and organizational citizenship behaviors, the benefit of tenure
appears to drop as tenure increases.
One Morally Bankrupt Apple Spoils the Bunch…
Topic: Counter-Productive Work Behavior
Publication: Academy of Management Journal
Article: The normalization of deviant
organizational practices: Wage arrears in Russia, 1991-98
Authors: Earle, Spicer, & Peter
Reviewed By: Katie Bachman
…And by “apple,” I mean “organization”. Lately, have you found yourself wondering how they got away with it for so long (I’m lookin’ at you, Wall Street)? Have you wondered why corruption seems to be an industry norm instead of just one corrupt organization? Why didn’t anyone stop them? If it seems like all the organizations are in it together, you’re kind of right.
Research on the use of wage arrears—purposely delaying payment of workers’ earned wages—in Russia showed that as deviant business practices became the norm, they quickly adopted as the status quo for other organizations in the community. Looking at the numbers, it’s amazing how quickly this deviant practice spread. For the data reported, in 1991, 8% of organizations in Russia used wage arrears and of these organizations, they were an average of about 2 months behind in paying their workers. In 1998, 59% of organizations were using wage arrears and these organizations were well over 4 months behind in paying their workers.
What makes this all the more alarming is the reaction of workers to this deviant behavior. As arrears became more prevalent and extreme, workers were less likely to strike or quit. As deviant organizational behavior became normalized, the individuals being hurt by the practices adapted to the malicious practices.
In terms of preventing deviant practices, there are a couple of points for us to take away from this cautionary tale. First, deviant practices need to be stopped quickly, before stakeholders and perpetrators become numb to the corrupt behavior. Second, these wage arrears occurred in spite of laws against the practice. Regulations are not enough; we have to change the culture that rationalizes and allows deviant behavior.
Earle, J. S., Spicer, A., & Peter, K. S. (2010). The normalization of deviant
organizational practices: Wage arrears in Russia, 1991-98. Academy of Management Journal, 53, 218-237.
Illegitimate Tasks – You Want Me to do What!?
Topic: Counterproductive Work Behavior
Publication: Applied Psychology: An International Review (JAN 2010)
Article: Illegitimate tasks and counterproductive work behavior
Authors: N.K. Semmer, F. Tschan, L.L. Meier, S. Facchin, & N. Jacobshagen
Reviewed By: Benjamin Granger
The research on counterproductive work behavior (CWB) suggests that it often represents a form of retaliation in response to unfairness. In other words, when employees perceive unfairness in the workplace, they get even by engaging in behaviors that damage the organization or its employees.
Extending this line of research, Semmer and colleagues (2010) uncovered an interesting predictor to CWB: illegitimate tasks. Illegitimate tasks are tasks that are assigned to employees that undermine their professional identities. That is, employees have jobs and professions that involve a set of “normal” or “typical” tasks. This also implies that some tasks and/or duties should not be expected of certain employees (e.g., assigning a medical doctor to repair an air conditioner). According to Semmer et al., the assignment of illegitimate tasks (either unreasonable or unnecessary tasks), can undermine employees’ professional (and perhaps social) identities and possibly lead to CWB. As expected, Semmer et al. found that when employees perceive that they are assigned illegitimate tasks at work they are more likely to engage in CWBs targeted toward organizational members or the organization itself.
Clearly, managers should be careful when delegating tasks to certain employees. If employees view these work assignments as unreasonable or unnecessary given their profession, then they will be more likely to engage in CWBs.
Finally, since many supervisors are focused on the big picture (i.e., the overall goals of the organizational unit) they may simply be unaware that this phenomenon takes place. Clearly then, it is important to communicate to managers that employees do appraise tasks as being legitimate/illegitimate which can potentially lead to counter productive behaviors. Nevertheless, some tasks MUST be completed. Semmer et al. suggest that if supervisors demonstrate their willingness to complete such tasks, then their employees may be less likely to view them as illegitimate.
Semmer, N.K., Tschan, F., Meier, L.L, Facchin, S, & Jacobshagen, N. (2010). Illegitimate tasks and counterproductive work behavior. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 59(1), 70-96.
