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1995
Robinson and Bennett 565
gione and Quinn's (1974) counterproductive behavior and Hollinger and
Clark's property deviance, which they defined as "those instances where
employees acquire or damage the tangible property or assets of the work
organization without authorization" (1982; 333). The quadrant reflecting
relatively minor but still organizationally harmful deviant acts was labeled
"production deviance." This quadrant is similar to Mangione and Quinn's
(1974) doing little or nothing and Hollinger and Clark's production devi-
FIGURE 2
Typology of Deviant Workplace Behavior"
ORCANIZATIONAL
i
Production Deviance
Leaving early
Taking excessive breaks
Intentionally working slow
Wasting resources
Political Deviance
Showing favoritism
Cossiping about co-workers
Blaming co-workers
Competing nonbeneficially
\
Property Deviance
Sabotaging equipment
Accepting kickbacks
Lying about hours worked
Stealing from company
Personal Aggression
Sexual harassment
Verbal abuse
Stealing from co-workers
Endangering co-workers
SERIOUS
INTERPERSONAL
'These lists are not exhaustive. We provide a set of the most typical behaviors for each
category for illustrative purposes only.
566 Academy of Management Journal April
ance, which they defined as "behaviors that violate the formally proscribed
norms delineating the minimal quality and quantity of work to be accom-
plished" (1982: 333). The third quadrant contained minor and interperson-
ally harmful deviant behavior. We labeled this quadrant "political devi-
ance," defining the behavior as engagement in social interaction that puts
other individuals at a personal or political disadvantage. The final quadrant,
containing serious and interpersonally harmful deviant behavior, was la-
beled "personal aggression," which we defined as behaving in an aggressive
or hostile manner toward other individuals.
The four quadrants appeared to represent four distinct but related types
of deviance. To garner empirical support for our post hoc interpretations of
these categories, we had four judges who were blind to the study and its
results independently code the behaviors. These judges, who were not the
same as the judges used in phase 3, were doctoral students in management.
They coded each behavior into one of four categories on the basis of the
labels and definitions provided. Kappas were calculated for each of the four
categories to measure the degree of interrater reliability. Overall, the kappas,
which ranged from 74 to 89 percent, indicated high agreement between our
typology and the raters' categorization of the behaviors. These results lend
validity to our interpretation of the quadrant labels and their meanings.
DISCUSSION
The study reported here integrated numerous deviant workplace behav-
iors into a parsimonious framework. The results suggest that workplace de-
viance varies along two dimensions and can be classified into four types.
The typology derived here makes a contribution to the literature by empir-
ically validating Wheeler's (1976) distinction between serious and nonseri-
ous workplace offenses as well as Mangione and Quinn's (1974) and
Hollinger and Clark's (1982) typologies, which distinguish between produc-
tion and property deviance.
A more significant Contribution of this study is that it builds upon these
previous categorical schemes and produces a more accurate and compre-
hensive typology of workplace deviance. First, our typology identifies the
underlying dimensions of deviance and thus clarifies not only the different
categories of deviance but also how these categories are related to one an-
other. Second, the typology incorporates two previously neglected forms of
employee deviance, political deviance and personal aggression. To date, the
limited literature on workplace deviance has focused primarily on produc-
tion and property deviance (acts directed at organizations), ignoring inter-
personal forms of deviance. As this study demonstrates, numerous behaviors
directed at individuals, including verbal abuse, physical assault, and polit-
ical behavior, are also perceived as deviant. These findings suggest that
workplace deviance research should address social as well as organization-
directed forms of deviance. This refocusing is important in light of growing
concerns about reducing social injustice, discrimination, and interpersonal
violence in workplaces.
1995 Robinson and Bennett 567
This typology should prove useful in the development of general theo-
ries of workplace deviance. First, it creates meaningful patterns out of the
wide range of deviant behaviors and enables researchers to look at the gamut
of deviant behaviors as a parsimonious whole. Second, it identifies the re-
lationships between these behaviors as well as their underlying constructs.
This framework paves the way for creating an integrated theory or theories
encompassing the behaviors found within each quadrant or across quad-
rants. Rather than continue to expend efforts on separate, unconnected, and
potentially redundant studies of specific deviant acts, researchers can begin
to develop and test theoretical models of the basic forms of deviant behavior,
such as production deviance and personal aggression. Such theories will
direct research attention and enable systematic exploration of this phenom-
enon and cumulation of findings.
The results of this study have implications for theories addressing the
antecedents of workplace deviance. Opinions on the causes of deviance
abound; some have argued that deviance results from individual attributes,
such as low moral standards (Merriam, 1977), and others have argued for
situational explanations of deviance, such as organizational inequities
(Greenberg, 1990) and group norms (Siehl, 1987). This study suggests that
different variables may explain different types of workplace deviance. For
example, organizational variables might be more likely to influence devi-
ance directed at harming organizations, and individual variables may be
more likely to explain interpersonal forms of deviance.
The results of this study may also have implications for theories ad-
dressing the outcomes of workplace deviance. Deviance may be dysfunc-
tional and threatening to the well-being of a social system (Best & Luckenbill,
1982), but it may have several positive outcomes as well: providing a safety
valve, alerting group members to their common interests, and providing
warning signals to organizations. This study, which clarifies the different
types of workplace deviance, suggests that different forms of deviance may
have different consequences. For example, interpersonal deviance may serve
social functions for organization membersbuilding group cohesiveness,
for exampleand organization-directed deviance may be more likely to
serve signaling functions for organizations.
This typology, which incorporates a wide range of behaviors from var-
ious domains of organizational behavior, is also valuable in that it connects
these previously unrelated domains of study. For example, the employee
deviance literature, which has focused almost exclusively on organization-
directed forms of deviance such as sabotage and theft, has remained largely
separate from the growing literature on discrimination and sexual harass-
ment in the workplace (Kahn & Robbins, 1985; Levinger, 1987), which ad-
dresses some behaviors that could be considered interpersonal forms of de-
viance. Our typology may provide a bridge between these two currently
unrelated bodies of research by cohceptually integrating organizational and
interpersonal deviance. Similarly, this typology may offer a conceptual
bridge between the traditional study of absenteeism and withdrawal (re-
568 Academy of Management Journal April
fleeted in production deviance) and other, thus far unrelated behaviors that
we also identified as forms of production deviance, such as wasting com-
pany resources and intentionally working slowly.
These findings also have managerial implications. Procedural justice
research has shown that employees perceive consistent punishment as fair
(Bennett, 1993); that is, punishment is perceived to be fair to the extent that
similar behaviors are punished similarly and to the extent that it matches the
seriousness of the offense committed (Wheeler, 1976). This study reveals
employees' perceptions of the similarity between potentially punishable be-
haviors and their perceptions of the seriousness of these behaviors. The
procedural justice findings, combined with the results of this study, suggest
that managers who are seeking to be fair should apply similar types of pun-
ishments to deviant acts that are physically close to one another in the
spatial configuration, such as intentionally making errors and engaging in
sabotage. Managers should also match the severity of punishment to the
perceived seriousness of a deviant act; for instance, employees accepting
kickbacks and employees intentionally making errors should receive simi-
lar, severe punishments, whereas employees intentionally working slowly
should receive less severe punishments.
Although this study focused on deviant workplace behavior rather than
on unethical behavior, it does suggest that the study of ethics may benefit
from an analogous multidimensional scaling study of unethical behavior.
Robertson (1993), discussing ethics research, offered a number of recommen-
dations. Specifically, she recommended that researchers clarify their oper-
ational definition of ethics, emphasize behavior as the key dependent vari-
able, focus on theory development, and build broader predictive models of
behavior. An MDS study like the one employed here would begin to address
these exact issues.
To summarize, the present study makes a variety of theoretical and
practical contributions. Its findings empirically validate previous categorical
schemes of deviance and extend those typologies by identifying the thus far
neglected interpersonal forms of deviance. Further, this typology should
prove useful for developing much-needed general theories of workplace de-
viance, particularly theories concerning the antecedents and outcomes of
forms of workplace deviance. It should also aid in creating aggregated mea-
sures of workplace deviance to be used to test those theories. More broadly,
the typology generated here may provide a valuable conceptual bridge to
previously unrelated domains of study and serve as a model for related
domains of study, such as organizational ethics. Finally, this typology has
practical implications, suggesting guidelines for ways in which managers
can fairly allocate punishments for deviant behavior.
Several limitations of this study should be noted. First, it was not tech-
nically or conceptually feasible to use an exhaustive list of deviant behav-
iors. The purpose of our study was to develop a typology from which we
could classify most deviant behaviors (not only those used to create the
typology). That goal was accomplished. Second, although we attempted to
1995 Robinson and Bennett 569
reduce researcher biases, they were not eliminated. Our biases may, for
example, have entered the study when we selected and rephrased the be-
havioral descriptions to be used in the analysis. However, we only shortened
descriptions, changing no content, and we removed only descriptions of
already included behaviors. Second, we may have also been biased in our
selection of the attributes used in interpreting the dimensions. However, we
selected only the most frequently used attributes, prior to looking at the
configuration. Further, since we based the interpretation of the dimensions
on a large set of attributes, the inclusion or exclusion of an additional at-
tribute is unlikely to have altered this interpretation. And finally, in deriving
the names and meanings of the quadrants, we relied on our post hoc inter-
pretation of the clusters. We attempted to offset the potential bias in this
interpretation by validating our results with the judgments of independent
and blind judges. In sum, we made a conscious effort to reduce the influence
of our biases in the development of this inductively derived typology.
We hope this study will bring attention to the darker side of organiza-
tional behavior. It is our intention that this study serve as a springboard for
additional empirical research into workplace deviance. Some future re-
search directions include the development of aggregated measures of devi-
ance based on the "four p' s" (property deviance, production deviance, po-
litical deviance, and personal aggression) and the development of predictive
models of deviance that take into account the wide range of deviant behav-
iors. Management research has developed a fairly comprehensive under-
standing of extrarole, prosocial, organizational citizenship behavior (e.g..
Organ, 1988) but has largely neglected subrole, antisocial, deviant behavior.
Researchers and practitioners need to understand not only behavior that is
beneficial to organizations, but also behavior that is detrimental to them.
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APPENDIX
Deviant Behavior Descriptions Used in the
Multidimensional Scaling Analysis
Employee stealing customer's possessions.
Boss verbally abusing employee.
Employee sabotaging equipment.
Employee coming to work late or leaving early.
Employee lying about hours worked.
Employee gossiping about manager.
Employee starting negative rumors about company.
Boss sexually harassing employee.
Employee physically abusing customer.
Employee taking excessive breaks.
Employee sabotaging merchandise.
Employee overcharging on services to profit him- or herself.
Employee intentionally making errors.
Employee covering up mistakes.
Employee leaving job in progress with no directions so the job is done wrong.
Boss following rules to the letter of the law.
Employee gossiping about co-worker.
Employee intentionally working slowly.
Boss unjustifiably firing employee.
Employee sexually harassing co-worker.
Employee accepting kickbacks.
Employee endangering him- or herself by not following safety procedures.
Boss leaving early and leaving his/her work for employees to do.
Employee hiding in hack room to read the newspaper.
Employee stealing company equipment/merchandise.
Employee acting foolish in front of customers.
Employee verbally abusing customers.
Employee working unnecessary overtime.
Employee calling in sick when not.
Boss showing favoritism to certain employees.
Boss gossiping about employees.
Employee talking with co-worker instead of working.
Employee stealing money from cash drawer.
Employee misusing discount privilege.
Employee wasting company resources by turning up the heat and opening the windows.
Employee blaming co-worker for mistakes.
Employee misusing expense account.
Employee going against boss's decision.
^^2 Academy of Management Journal April
Employees competing with co-workers in a nonbeneficial way.
Boss blaming employees for his/her mistakes.
Boss refusing to give employee his/her earned benefits or pay.
Employee making personal long distance calls or mailing personal packages from work.
Employee endangering co-workers by reckless behavior.
Employee stealing co-worker's possessions.
Boss asking employee to work beyond job description.
Sandra L. Robinson is an assistant professor of management at the Stern School of
Business, New York University. She received a Ph.D. degree in organizational behavior
from Northwestern University. Her current research interests include workplace devi-
ance, psychological contracts, employee voice, and employees' behavioral responses to
dissatisfaction.
Rebecca J. Bennett is an assistant professor of management at the University of Toledo.
She received her Ph.D. degree in organizational behavior from Northwestern Univer-
sity. Her current research interests include workplace deviance, employees' behavioral
reactions to unfair punishment, and the relationship between organizational citizen-
ship behavior and workplace deviance.
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