Insidious Workplace Behavior

Jerald Greenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781848728592
• eBook ISBN: 9781136955327
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

Insidious Workplace Behavior (IWB) refers to low-level, pervasive acts of deviance directed at individual or organizational targets. Because of its inherently stealthy nature, scientists have paid little attention to IWB, allowing us to know very little about it. With this book, that now is changing. The present volume - the first to showcase this topic - presents original essays by top organizational scientists who share the most current thinking about IWB. Contributors examine, for example, the many forms that IWB takes, focusing on its antecedents, consequences, and moderators. They also highlight ways that organizational leaders can manage and constrain IWB so as to attenuate its adverse effects. And to promote both theory and practice in IWB, contributors also discuss the special problems associated with researching IWB and strategies for overcoming them.

Aimed at students, scholars, and practitioners in the organizational sciences - especially industrial-organizational psychology, organizational behavior, and human resource management - this seminal volume promises to inspire research and practice for years to come.

Section 1
Introduction

1
What Is Insidious Workplace Behavior?

Marissa S. Edwards and Jerald Greenberg

Headlines regularly chronicle audacious acts of criminal behavior that occur in the workplace. Whether it’s a disgruntled ex-employee who fires a gun at his former coworkers (Leavitt, 1995), an investment broker who swindles billions of dollars from his clients (Efrati, Lauricella, & Searcey, 2008), or a governor of a U.S. state who auctions off a vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder (Keen, 2008), accounts of gross misdeeds are all too common. Despite what their prevalence in the news may suggest, such extreme acts are merely the tip of the iceberg of deviant workplace behavior.

Far beneath the surface, however, lays a broad base of deviant behaviors that fail to grab public attention because they are prosaic, sometimes covert, and seemingly benign in nature. Examples include an employee who makes one of her coworkers the target of her daily racial jokes, a coach who shoves one of his players each time he makes a mistake on the field, and an executive who badmouths his assistant whenever he walks away. Greenberg (2004) referred to such subtle but pervasive forms of deviance as insidious workplace behavior (IWB).

Given its under-the-radar qualities, it’s not surprising that we only rarely hear about IWB, if ever. “Boss teases subordinate” is hardly newsworthy, leaving IWB to receive little attention by either the press or management scholars. Not only doesn’t the behavior call attention to itself, but until now, social scientists didn’t know to look for it. Yet, to the particular “boss” and “subordinate” involved, the incident may have value, especially when it’s part of a repeated pattern. Indeed, as chronicled in this book, because the cumulative impact of IWB, furtive though it may be, is often considerable, taking a toll on victims, it is a potentially important area of study. For this potential to be realized, however, it is essential for IWB to be clearly defined and for its various forms to be identified. We perform these tasks in this chapter.

DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS

The word insidious has been defined variously as “spreading or developing or acting inconspicuously but with harmful effect” (Oxford American Dictionary, 1980, p. 342) and “stealthily treacherous or deceitful; operating or proceeding inconspicuously but with grave effect” (Macquarie Concise Dictionary, 1998, p. 584). Abstractions aside, the term’s meaning becomes clearest in context. For example, the political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington (2004) contrasted the imparting of limited or incomplete information with lying, by noting that “partial truths or half-truths are often more insidious than total falsehoods” (see page). And in her groundbreaking memoir, Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel (1994) explained that the challenge of living with clinical depression lies in the fact that its effects are “insidious and compound daily” (see page).

Our definition of IWB is in keeping with this general meaning, but narrowed to fit the context of workplace behavior. Specifically, we define insidious workplace behavior as a form of intentionally harmful workplace behavior that is legal, subtle, and low level (rather than severe), repeated over time, and directed at individuals or organizations. Importantly, IWB is not a unique behavior in its own right, but rather a particular form of several varieties of deviant behavior. The set of qualifying characteristics is as follows.

• Intentionally harmful: Acts that are performed in an effort to bring harm.
• Legal: Acts that do not break the law.
• Low-level severity: Acts that are subtle and incidental in nature, with minor (sometimes, seemingly unremarkable) effects that may go unnoticed when they occur on an isolated basis.
• Repetitive: Acts that are repeated over time (as opposed to single acts) with effects that are cumulative in nature.
• Individually and organizationally targeted: The intended victim of harm usually is another individual, although it also may be an organization with which the actor is associated.

This characterization of IWB paints a picture of subtle and stealthy behavior that cumulatively chips away at a worker’s dignity—or, using morbid metaphors, “death by a thousand paper cuts,” or “being nibbled to death by guppies.” Although some authors have made passing mention to this type of behavior (e.g., Skarlicki & Folger, 1997), to our knowledge, it has not been examined fully to date. To shed further light on the nature of IWB, we now take a closer look at its defining characteristics.

Intentionally Harmful

In keeping with Robinson and Bennett’s (1995) conceptualization of deviant behavior, we contend that the motive underlying IWB is to inflict harm (on either an individual or organization, as we will note later). This is important to note because several of the contributors to the present volume indicate that some acts that appear to be IWB actually may be driven by prosocial motives and can result in constructive outcomes. For example, Grover (Chapter 7, this volume) observes that employees sometimes tell white lies to protect colleagues’ feelings; and Seabright, Ambrose, and Schminke (Chapter 3, this volume) suggest that sabotage is not always intended to be harmful. Appearances may be deceptive in these cases because the behaviors in question are not motivated by the desire to bring harm, and therefore, may not be considered insidious. With this in mind, we caution against labeling any acts as IWB in the absence of knowledge of the actor’s negative intentions.

As Andersson and Pearson (1999) note in their review of incivility, the intention underlying many workplace behaviors is often difficult to detect. In the case of incivility, they suggest that perpetrators can deny all responsibility by arguing that the behavior was not intended to offend, suggesting that the target misinterpreted the behavior or is simply hypersensitive. In similar fashion, Einarsen, Hoel, Zapf, and Cooper (2003) state that it is extremely difficult to determine the presence of intent in episodes of workplace bullying and sexual harassment. Neuman and Baron (2005) observe that this is one reason why some researchers have elected to exclude harmful intentions from their conceptualizations of deviance. Although we acknowledge these points, we believe that it is essential to include negative intentions in our definition of IWB because without this criterion, IWB would be indistinguishable from accidental instances of low-level, pervasive negligence. For example, if an employee failed repeatedly to include a colleague in important group discussions via e-mail because he or she forgot that the individual’s e-mail address had changed, this would not represent an example of IWB because the actor did not intend to harm that colleague.

By imposing this condition, we recognize that attributions of intentionality rest on the target’s perceptions and interpretations of events, which are, of course, fallible and difficult to assess. We believe, however, that the inherent ambiguity of many subtle and frequently occurring forms of employee behavior underscores the importance of assessing employees’ motives for performing the behavior before labeling them as IWB (Conte, 2009). Indeed, most acts we consider to be IWB probably should be referred to as “presumed IWB” or “apparent IWB.”

Legal

Generally, discussions of workplace behavior focus on legal acts, but this is not always so. The literature on employee theft (e.g., Greenberg & Scott, 1996), for example, examines acts ranging from pilfering (generally not regarded to be illegal) to grand theft and embezzlement (highly illegal). Likewise, only most extreme acts of workplace violence are illegal (e.g., shooting or physically assaulting someone), although more benign, yet disruptive, forms of workplace aggression (e.g., a minor skirmish characterized by name-calling in raised voices) may be perfectly legal (Baron & Neuman, 1996).

For a behavior to be classified as IWB, it must be legal. This criterion is reasonable insofar as IWB, as will be noted later, involves repeated behavior. And assuming some modicum of law enforcement, it’s unlikely that illegal behavior can be repeated too many times without being put to a stop.

Admittedly, the matter of legality is difficult to apply in the case of sexual harassment. In countries in which sexual harassment is illegal under state and national law (e.g., the United States and Australia), mild but pervasive instances of inappropriate touching and sexual comments in an organization may or may not constitute IWB. This ambiguity is based on the fact that laws are often framed using terms such as “unwanted” and “offensive,” making the legality of any claims of harassment a matter to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Thus, some but not all instances of sexual harassment may be considered IWB.

Low-Level Severity

Vardi and Weitz (2004) observe that the severity of misbehavior can be measured in behavioral and attitudinal forms. Behaviorally, severity may be evaluated according to its frequency, in addition to “the centrality of the violated norm or value … [and] the degree of premeditation, preoccupation, or planning involved in the misbehavior” (see page). Attitudinally, the severity of misbehavior may be measured according to “the strength or intensity of the [individual’s] intention, predisposition or propensity” (see page) to engage in the deviant behavior. Extending these foci, we contend that the consequences of the behavior are another critical component of severity. Specifically, in the case of IWB, we suggest that the outcomes of specific acts may not be especially harmful in the short term, although their cumulative detrimental effects over time can be considerable (Schneider, Swan, & Fitzgerald, 1997).

Using this consequence-based approach, acts of IWB, by definition, are low in severity. Each occurrence may be considered a deviant act of low severity, such as when a supervisor embarrasses an employee in front of others. The individual act may be so benign as to be unremarkable although the cumulative impact of many such acts repeated over time— the body of work in its entirety, so to speak—may be severe. As such, those rude and uncivil acts constitute IWB.

Several researchers have noted that deviant acts vary with respect to severity (e.g., Andersson & Pearson, 1999; Skarlicki & Folger, 2004). Bullying/mobbing, a phenomenon described in this book (Neuman & Keashly, Chapter 2), illustrates this variation. Some bullies, for example, terrorize victims through physical violence or verbal threats, whereas others engage in low-level personal campaigns designed to undermine victims’ self-esteem and self-efficacy. Such efforts may take such forms as ostracism (i.e., exclusion and isolation; Lustenberger & Williams, 2009), setting unreasonably high work demands, or being unfairly critical of employees’ performance (Simpson & Cohen, 2004). This same variation is addressed in the more general literature on aggressive behavior. For example, Baron and Neuman (1996) note that whereas some acts of aggression are extreme and overt (e.g., homicide), others are less visible and ambiguous with respect to their underlying aggressive motive (e.g., arriving late for a meeting, ignoring voice mail or e-mail messages). In all these cases of deviant behaviors, the low-severity acts may be considered IWB.

Finally, we note that severity was one of the dimensions used by Robinson and Bennett (1995) in their typology of deviant behavior. Among the most severe behaviors identified in their study were sabotaging equipment, stealing from the company, verbal abuse, and endangering coworkers. Less severe behaviors included blaming coworkers, gossiping about coworkers, and showing favoritism. Such acts may be considered IWB if they also meet our additional criteria (e.g., they are intentionally harmful and occur repeatedly over time). Robinson and Bennett noted that their “serious–not serious” dimension was related negatively to the covert or overt nature of the behavior in question: Serious acts tend to be overt in nature (because they are difficult to hide), whereas less serious ones tend to be covert (because they are easy to hide or are not even noticeable). This is in keeping with our depiction of IWB as being difficult to detect.

Repetitive

Our fourth defining characteristic of IWB is that it is repetitive. In other words, it occurs frequently and persistently over time. In contrast to a single act of aggression (e.g., a tantrum involving screaming at one’s boss), employees who perpetrate IWB engage in repeated episodes (frequency: how often) over a series of days, weeks, months, or even years (duration: over how long a time).

Our definition may be juxtaposed with those of others who have elected to specify the frequency or duration of various deviant behaviors. Tepper’s (2000) definition of abusive supervision—“subordinates’ perceptions of the extent to which supervisors engage in the sustained display of hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviors, excluding physical contact” (see page)—is a good example of this because it acknowledges the persistent nature of the behavior in question. Also, we note that almost all definitions of workplace bullying specify that the behavior must occur on a repeated basis— typically at least weekly, over a duration of six months—in order to be classified as bullying (Einarsen et al., 2003). Additionally, Duffy, Ganster, and Pagon (2002) suggest that social undermining in the workplace involves ongoing attempts to hinder positive social interactions, explaining that such behaviors “are insidious, in that they weaken gradually or by degrees” (see page).

Keashly and Jagatic (2003) provide an excellent analysis of issues of frequency and duration in their discussion of workplace bullying in the United States. Commenting on the literature, they note that “even seemingly minor behaviors can have significant effects when they occur frequently and over extended time periods” (Keashly & Jagatic, 2003, p. 53). At the same time, they observe that a major limitation of the research thus far is that researchers have investigated discrete instances of bullying almost exclusively instead of examining the effects of persistent and repetitive behaviors over time. They note further that although some definitions of workplace bullying specify the duration of the behaviors, most researchers have failed to take duration into account when measuring deviance. In this connection, Keashly and Jagatic suggest that scientists would be well served to measure the frequency with which people are exposed to deviant behavior (e.g., in days, weeks, or months) and how they affect their experience and subsequent coping.

In summary, we argue that researchers should assess the number of exposures during each time period (i.e., frequency) when investigating deviant behavior. Greatest impact would be expected under conditions in which a high frequency of deviant acts occurs over long periods of time. In the case of IWB, low-level acts may have the most profound effects when the product of their Duration × Frequency is high. This multiplicative assumption is consistent with the notion that if either one of these values is 0, so too will be the effect. Additionally, lacking reason to do otherwise, we give equal weight to duration and frequency, although in practice, these may differ for various forms of behavior. Clearly, this is an issue in need of future research.

Individually and Organizationally Targeted

Some deviant behaviors are directed toward harming organizations (e.g., intentionally working slowly) and others are directed toward individuals (e.g., gossiping). Following the lead of scientists studying organizational citizenship (Organ & Ryan, 1995), who distinguish between acts aimed at organizations (OCB-O) and those aimed at individuals (OCB-I), we refer to these as IWB-O and IWB-I, respectively. If they otherwise meet the additional criteria, such acts, aimed at either target can be regarded as IWB.

This specification spans the distinction between individually targeted and organizationally targeted forms of deviance made by Robinson and Bennett (1995), and we are not the first to erect such a bridge. For example, Rayner, Hoel, and Cooper (2002) note that acts of bullying can be aimed at individuals, groups, or entire organizations. Their approach and ours are in keeping with Vardi and Wiener’s (1996) claim that constructs of workplace deviance should be defined with sufficient breadth to allow for inclusion of several forms of behavior.

This is important because, as Berry, Ones, and Sackett (2007) observed, most instances of interperso...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Foreword
• Preface
• About the Editor
• Contributors
• Section 1 Introduction
• Section 2 Forms of Insidious Workplace Behavior
• Section 3 Methodological Issues
• Section 4 Integration