Organizational Deviance In The Workplace Behavior

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1.1 Introduction
An organization consists of individuals who work together to accomplish the goals. These individuals/employees belong to various segments of the society, and exhibit diverse behaviors. Whatever the diversity is, it is within the organizational norms. The organizational norms are the common or acceptable attitudes and behavior of the members of the organization.
Organization’s primary objective is to achieve the set goals, aims to increase productivity utilizing minimum resources. To this end, they try to establish an environment where the employees feel comfortable, resultantly increasing their performance individually and collectively. However, despite of efforts, it has been observed that not all the employees reciprocate. Intentionally or unintentionally unconstructive or negative behavior also prevails in the organization. This non-productive behavior includes gossip, personal phone calls, cyber loafing, harassment, stealing, abusing organizational property or even limiting productivity. This observable variance in behavior has been identified as non-compliant behavior (Puffer, 1987), counter-productive work behavior (Spector et al., 2006) and workplace deviance (Robinson & Bennett, 1995) etc.
A workplace deviance has been defined as “voluntary behavior that violates significant organizational norms and in doing so threatens the well-being of an organization, and or its members” (Robinson & Bennett, 1995). It is directly proportional to the cost,