Deviant Behavior In The Workplace

1085 Words5 Pages

Workplace deviant behavior at work has increasingly emerging as an important phenomenon in organizations because of the negative and adverse effects it brings. Workplace deviance behavior at work also has become the focus of an increasing number of research studies (Ones, Viswesvaran & Schmidt, 1993; Robinson & Bennett, 1995; Sackett & DeVore, 2001). Organizations need to bear the cost of lost productivity when employees engage in behaviors when they fail to turn up at all without any reasonable excuse. Example for workplace deviant behavior is sexual harassment and steal the organizational property also harm the effectiveness of the organization. Sexual harassment also another form of workplace deviant behavior and has reported to cause job …show more content…

Workplace deviant behavior can be defined as behavior that employees either lack motivation to conform to or become motivated to violate, normative expectations of the social context (Kaplan, 1975). Furthermore, (Bordia, Restubog and Tang, 2008) recommended that deviant behaviour is not an accidental but volitional. Individuals usually have certain motives when they involved in deviant behavior. In order to labelled some behaviour are deviant must go against the organization’s norms regardless to society’s norms. For instance, if an organization sanctions the purchase of prostitutes for an organizational functions such as was reported by Astra USA (Powell, 2002) this example are not in terms of workplace deviant behavior. The term “deviant” only means that behavior deviates from the explicit and implicit norms of the organization. According to (Robinson and Bennett, 1995), behaviors such as blowing the whistle maybe viewed as extremely ethical by many, but would be fit as deviance. Some researchers have their own view why workplace deviance occurs. From (Aquino, Lewis & Bradfield, 1999) views, individuals engage in deviant behavior to seek for an equity and justice. From social exchange view, unsupportive or unfavorable work environment tend to make employees did …show more content…

One of the important organizational factors is human resource practices (J. B. Arthur, 1994) (M. A. Huselid, 1995). Various researchers agree that HR practices are to manage the pool of human resources and ensure that the resources are utilized for the fulfilment of organizational goals (R. S. Schuler and S.F. Jackson, 1987) (P. M. Wright and S. A. Snell, 1991). Form the literature, negative work outcomes such as absenteeism and turnover (usually good employees who quit their job voluntarily), it is also possible to link that HR practices could contribute to deviant behavior. In general, the more favorable the HR practices are in that organization, the more favorable the work outcomes will be. As mentioned earlier, previous studies have revealed that unfavorable work environment could generally result in poor work performance. On the other hand, when HR practices seen to be undesirably practiced, employees will return such “favor” by doing their unfavorable behavior or deviant