Counterproductive work behavior

Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) is employee behavior that goes against the legitimate interests of an organization. These behaviors can harm organizations or people in organizations including employees and clients, customers, or patients. It has been proposed that a person-by-environment interaction can be utilized to explain a variety of counterproductive behaviors. For instance, an employee who is high on trait anger (tendency to experience anger) is more likely to respond to a stressful incident at work (being treated rudely by a supervisor) with CWB.

Some researchers use the CWB term to subsume related constructs that are distinct. Workplace deviance is behavior at work that violates norms for appropriate behavior. Retaliation consists of harmful behaviors done by employees to get back at someone who has treated them unfairly.Workplace revenge are behaviors by employees intended to hurt another person who has done something harmful to them.Workplace aggression consists of harmful acts that harm others in organizations.

Several typologies of CWB exist.

Using the term deviance (behavior that violates accepted norms), Robinson and Bennett created a four-class typology of CWBs divided the CWBs into the following dimensions:

A five dimension typology of CWB

An 11 dimension typology of CWB

A two-dimensional model of CWBs distinguished by organizational versus person target has gained considerable acceptance. Additional dimensions have been proposed for research purposes, including a legal v. illegal dimension, a hostile v. instrumental aggression dimension, and a task-related v. a non-task-related dimension. CWBs that violate criminal law may have different antecedents than milder forms of CWBs. Similarly, instrumental aggression (i.e., aggression with a deliberate goal in mind) may have different antecedents than those CWBs caused by anger.

Absenteeism is typically measured by time lost (number of days absent) measures and frequency (number of absence episodes) measures. It is weakly linked to affective predictors such as job satisfaction and commitment. Absences fit into two types of categories. Excused absences are those due to personal or family illness; unexcused absences include an employee who does not come to work in order to do another preferred activity or neglects to call in to a supervisor. Absence can be linked to job dissatisfaction. Major determinants of employee absence are employee affect, demographic characteristics, organizational absence culture, and organization absence policies. Absence due to non-work obligations is related to external features of a job with respect to dissatisfaction with role conflict, role ambiguity, and feelings of tension. Absences due to stress and illness are related to internal and external features of the job, fatigue and gender. Research has found that women are more likely to be absent than men, and that the absence-control policies and culture of an organization will predict absenteeism.

...
Wikipedia