Misbehavior in Organizations

A Dynamic Approach

Yoav Vardi, Ely Weitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317555353
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

This revised edition of Misbehavior in Organizations updates and expands upon the integrative OMB (organizational misbehavior) framework pioneered by the authors. Streamlined for improved readability, it covers key topics that have emerged in the scholarly literature in the past decade including insidious workplace behavior, bullying and harassment in the workplace, information hiding, cyberbullying, and organizational spirituality. A thorough and up-to-date resource on this crucial and evolving topic in organizational studies, this book provides insights on misbehavior at the individual, position, group, and organizational levels.

Part I Organizational Misbehavior (OMB)

1 Organizational Behavior and Misbehavior

DOI: 10.4324/9781315732565-1

Problematic behavioral manifestations in the organized workplace are not new. F. W. Taylor (1895, 1903) brought the practice of soldiering or goldbricking—deliberately slowing down production—to light. The early proponents of the Human Relations School reported extensively on production restriction and rate-busting (and their consequences) as early as the 1920s (Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1964). Greenberg and Scott (1996) dated employee theft (a major form of organizational misbehavior) to ancient times. These phenomena are unquestionably universal. Therefore, it is safe to assume that most, if not all, members of work organizations, throughout their employment, engage in some form of misbehavior related to their jobs, albeit in varying degrees of frequency and intensity. Hence, to achieve a better understanding of organizational behavior (OB), we must study organizational misbehavior as well. Organizational misbehavior (OMB) is defined as acts in the workplace that are committed intentionally and constitute a violation of rules pertaining to such behaviors. We strongly believe that, to truly comprehend the behavior of people at work and the functioning of organizations, social scientists need to explore and research both the positive and negative aspects of work-life. After all, how can we understand the functional if we fail to recognize the dysfunctional and unconventional?

During the past three decades, organization scholars have become more willing to acknowledge that various forms of work-related misbehavior by employees and managers are prevalent, and that their consequences for employers are indeed quite significant and costly (e.g., Neuman & Baron, 2005; Griffin & Lopez, 2005; Berry et al., 2007; Greenberg, 2010; Hershcovis & Barling, 2010; Tepper & Henle, 2011). Such behaviors range a full spectrum from minor to serious—a mere perception of violation of the psychological contract (e.g., Bordia et al., 2008); minor workplace incivility (e.g., Lim et al., 2008; Reich & Hershcovis, 2015); insulting behaviors (e.g., Francis et al., 2015); workplace social undermining (e.g., Duffy et al., 2006); knowledge-hiding (e.g., Connelly et al., 2012); theft of company assets (e.g., Tomlinson & Greenberg, 2007); cyberloafing (e.g., Weatherbee, 2010; Kidwell, 2010); acts of destructiveness, vandalism, and sabotage (e.g., Skarlicki et al., 2008); substance abuse while at work (Frone, 2008, 2013); aggression perpetrated against fellow employees or toward the organization (e.g., Neuman & Baron, 2005; Barling et al., 2009; Hershcovis & Barling, 2010; Hershcovis & Reich, 2013); bullying (e.g., Einarsen et al., 2011); and abusive supervision (Tepper, 2007; Mackey et al., 2015).

Although such forms of misconduct appear to be rampant and universal, systematic OB research of these phenomena is lacking (Vardi & Wiener, 1992, 1996). There is also conceptual confusion in describing them (O’Leary-Kelly et al., 2000a; Bowling & Gruys, 2010; Tepper & Henle, 2011). Until recently, OB, as a distinct academic discipline devoted to exploring and expanding our understanding of work behavior, has lagged behind other social science disciplines in exploring this vast domain. This is quite surprising given that OMB, referred to by other scholars as antisocial (Giacalone & Greenberg, 1997; Thau et al., 2007), dysfunctional (O’Leary-Kelly & Collins, 1998; Griffin & Lopez, 2005), deviant (Hollinger & Clark, 1982; Robinson & Bennett, 1995), or counterproductive behavior (Sackett & DeVore, 2001; Fox & Spector, 2005), is not restricted to certain marginal members. It has been recorded for workers of all types of organizations—for employees at all levels of the organizational hierarchy, salaried professionals and non-professionals, and both non-supervisory and managerial employees (cf. Giacalone & Greenberg, 1997; Griffin et al., 1998a; Robinson & Greenberg, 1998; Vardi & Weitz, 2002a).

This chapter is devoted to the ubiquity of OMB. First, we discuss the prevalence of misbehavior and then employ a historical perspective to search the literature for previously proposed typologies and definitions for employee misbehavior. Second, we address the question why the field of OB has overlooked OMB and has, in fact, evolved into a (positively) “skewed” discipline focusing on more normative aspects of work behavior. Last, we describe the emergence of the current interest in OMB from the early sociological research of white-collar crime, focusing on employee deviance, workplace aggression, and political organizational behavior as selected examples.

Prevalence of Misbehavior at Work

Undoubtedly, OMB comes with a hefty price tag. With its cost comes a growing awareness of it. Estimates of the costs of the most prevalent misbehavior—employee theft—run as high as $51 billion annually in the United States alone (Global Retail Theft Barometer, 2011). Estimates of the costs resulting from problem drinking in the workplace run as high as $162 billion in 2006 (Frone, 2013). The economics of OMB are indeed staggering once the costs of fraud, sabotage, vandalism, substance abuse, litigation, and so on are factored in, although some costs may be offset by benefits that often follow organizational improvements launched due to misbehavior such as blocking the promotion of a fraudulent candidate, or installing new quality and monitoring practices in the wake of exposure of misconduct by whistleblowers. Moreover, information concerning intellectual property theft by employees has become publicly available on the internet by governmental agencies and private security firms (e.g., www.symantec.com). One site (www.whistleblowing.co.za) offers employees an opportunity to anonymously blow the whistle on fraud, pilfering, and embezzlement in their companies. Case-based and practitioner-oriented literature flourished in the 1990s under such telling titles as Dirty business (Punch, 1996) and Are your employees stealing you blind? (Bliss & Aoki, 1993). Some semi-academic (e.g., Denenberg & Braverman, 1999) and academic (e.g., Kelloway et al., 2006) books offer solid practical advice on how to prevent violent behavior in the workplace or handle employee problem drinking (Frone, 2013). Shulman (2007) has, quite convincingly, made the case for the prevalence of employee deception in the workplace.

Research in work organizations has provided ample evidence for the large variety of OMB. Mars (1974) studied deviant work practices among dockworkers, Hollinger and Clark (1982) found it in all sectors of the economy, and Analoui and Kakabadse (1992) conducted a longitudinal study of an entertainment and hospitality organization and found unconventional practices among both managers and employees. Greenberg (1990a, 1997) extensively examined the causes of employee theft in organizations, Treviño (1986) investigated unethical managerial decisions, Raelin (1984) studied deviant behavior among professionals, and Giacalone and Rosenfeld (1987) researched sabotage behavior. “As the organizational misbehavior literature has grown and terminology has been added to the academic lexicon” (Tepper & Henle, 2011, p. 487) researchers have begun to incorporate a variety of definitions, typologies and models into organizational studies (see Greenberg, 2010; Van Wijhe et al., 2014; Neall & Tuckey, 2014; Ashforth et al., 2008). In fact, there is a growing research interest in specific OMB phenomena such as incivility (Cortina & Magley, 2009; Lim et al., 2008; Reich & Hershcovis, 2015), lying and deceiving (Grover, 2010; Shulman, 2007), whistleblowing (Miceli et al., 2008), substance abuse (Frone, 2013), sexual harassment (McDonald, 2012; Popovich & Warren, 2010; Willness et al., 2007), and bullying (Glambek et al., 2014). Remember, this is just a sample. As Moberg (1997) once observed, both employee virtue and employee vice seem endless.

Misbehavior in Organizational Behavior Discourse

OB is an interdisciplinary field of research that explores the behavior of individuals and groups within organizational contexts, as well as the structure and behavior of organizations (see Greenberg, 1994; Miner, 2002 on the state of the science). At the macro-level, OB is rooted in sociology, political science, and economics; it deals with questions of organizational form, design, and action in the socioeconomic context. At the micro-level, OB stems from psychology, especially industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology, focusing on the individual and dealing with his or her attitudes and behavior and how these affect and are affected by the organizational system (Staw, 1984). During its years of development, OB was primarily influenced by its psychological origins, as may be evidenced by the objects of its research and subjects of its practice (Cappelli & Sherer, 1991; Mowday & Sutton, 1993). Similarly, the social psychology roots of OB have contributed to the extensive interest in workgroups and teams in organizations (the meso-level).

Most OB research focuses on the individual (micro) level, rather than on the effects of culture and environment on behavior (Porter & Schneider, 2014). Some scholars argue that this tendency to emphasize interpersonal differences over situational variables is somewhat of a universal approach in OB (Erez & Early, 1993), which may indeed be its main drawback (Cappelli & Sherer, 1991). This line of thought led researchers such as Mowday and Sutton (1993) to conclude that the field is exhausted—that scholars should redirect their attention to the macro-level and search for new relationships between the organizational context and its individual members’ behaviors. We found, however, that although the research concerning the positive-normative behavior of the individual in the organization seems somewhat saturated, the systematic study of the darker side of human behavior at work (Vaughan, 1999) has only just begun.

An examination and tabulation of organizational behavior reviews (e.g., Shafir & LeBoeuf, 2002; Sackett & Lievens, 2008; Avolio et al., 2009; Bakker et al., 2014) highlights the tendency of theory and research to focus on a positive depiction of organizational life. Approximately 88 percent of the reviews are positively skewed, with attitudes toward work, motivation, and performance being the main areas of interest (see Appendix 2). For instance, reviews dealing with motivation refer to positive motivational frameworks such as self-efficacy theory, intrinsic motivation theories, goal theories, and self-regulation. Although workplaces may encompass a variety of negative as well as positive behaviors or attitudes, most of the reviews employ a traditional human resource management viewpoint of organizational productivity and address topics such as training, group performance and team effectiveness, appraisal and feedback, job design, job autonomy and job enrichment. Only a few authors addressed negative or dysfunctional forms of behavior in the workplace and reviewed topics such as organizational injustice, employee retaliation, withdrawal behaviors, workplace aggression, violence, and victimization, discrimination, deviance and dissent. Interestingly, when searching for the term “organizational citizenship behavior” (OCB), Google registers 357,000 results as compared with only 21,000 for the term “organizational misbehavior.”

The state of affairs is not much better in OB textbooks. A cursory study of some of the widely used OB textbooks (e.g., Daft, 2000; Daft & Noe, 2001; Greenberg & Baron, 1997; Hellriegel et al., 2001; Steers, 1991) reveals that most of the terms defined in the glossaries are positively skewed. None of these textbooks seriously relates to negative types of organizational behaviors. A notable exception is the widely used management textbook by Ivancevich, Konopaske, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Series Foreword
• Preface to Second Edition
• Part I Organizational Misbehavior (OMB)
• Part II OMB Manifestations and Antecedents
• Part III Implications for Research and Management
• Appendices
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index