Counterproductive Work Behavior Case Study

Counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs) were defined by Spector and Fox (2005) as voluntary acts intended to harm or affect organizations or employees in organizations. Counterproductive behaviors share the common feature of violating such authentic interests of an organization by doing potential harms to its members or to the organization as a whole (Sackett & Devore, 2001). CWB have been described in a number of ways, including organizational aggression (Baron & Neuman, 1996; Baron & Neuman, 1997; Spector, 1975), incivility (Sakurai & Jex, 2012), antisocial behavior (Giacalone & Greenberg, 1997); deviance (Hollinger, 1986; Robinson & Bennett, 1995), and retaliation (Skarlicki & Folger, 1997) but the common fundamental theme is that these behaviors harm the organization by directly affecting its functioning or property, or by impacting on employees in a way that reduces their performance.

Also, past researches suggest that such oversight can have significant outcomes, such as employee discontentment, job accidents, over use of sick leave, conflict of work teams, productivity deterioration and turnover intentions (Lim, Cortina & Magley, 2008).

Given that counterproductive work behaviors can

(2006) identified an approach on how to assess counterproductive work behavior and discovered the five dimensions of CWB and claimed that it can be classified under Buss’s (1961) distinction between primarily active and passive behaviors. Under active forms of CWB includes some type of behavior like abuse, theft, sabotage, to name a few. Abuse was defined against others consist of both physical and verbal actions. While passive behavior includes the employees’ inaction in the situation such as production deviance, defined as intentional failure when completing tasks correctly, withdrawal behaviors, etc. Despite having dimensions of counterproductive work behaviors, in the present study it is important to incorporate all the dimensions in just one