The Importance Of Workplace Behavior

There is growing interest among researchers and practitioners concerning deviant workplace behaviors. The number of studies examining such issues as fraud, vandalism, theft, lying, spreading malicious rumors, withholding effort, aggressive behavior, and sexual harassment in the workplace is growing rapidly (Griffin, O'Leary-Kelly, & Collins, 1998). The obvious impetus for the growing interest in counterproductive behavior is the increasing prevalence of this type of behavior in the workplace and the enormous costs associated with such behavior (Peterson, 2002). Several studies have documented not only the financial impact, but also the social and psychological effects of negative workplace behavior on the organization (Hollinger & Clark, 1982, 1983; Murphy, 1993; Robinson & Greenberg, 1998). The losses produced by employee deviance and delinquency were proved to be huge (Robinson & Bennett, 1995).

Workplace deviance has been defined as voluntary behavior that violates significant organizational norms and in so doing threatens the well-being of an organization, its members, or both (Robinson & Bennett, 1995). Deviant workplace behavior has been the topic of several investigations and this concept may arguably be considered the most fully developed (Bennett & Robinson, 2000; Robinson & Bennett, 1995; Robinson & Greenberg, 1998). Researchers have empirically developed a comprehensive typology of deviant workplace behaviors and validated potential methods for measuring workplace deviance. This paper focuses on the construct of deviant workplace behavior as defined by Robinson and Bennett (1995). An empirically derived typology of workplace deviance has been developed with the aid of a multidimensional scaling procedure. The results ...

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... employees is being constantly displayed in presence of or towards other employees, they will internalize it when this event occurs repeatedly; thus, they themselves will display some kinds of deviant behavior in response towards the business and job outcomes.

Based on those previous explorations of the possible cause of workplace deviance and social cognitive theory, we believe that manager or employee’s workplace deviances which destroy the organizational ethical climate and norms will have great influences on other employee’s deviant work behaviors. Following this logic, we have the follow research questions: Does Deviant work behavior pass on from manager to employees? Does Deviant work behavior pass on from employees to other employees? What kinds of deviant work behavior could pass on to other employees? Does different deviant work behavior spread differently?