Counterproductive Leader Behavior

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Counterproductive Leader Behavior

• Hannah L. Jackson
• Deniz S. Ones

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Counterproductive Leader Behavior

• Intentional behavior enacted by leaders that
  involves misuse of position or authority for
  personal and/or organizational benefit
• Leader behavior may be acceptable by the
  organizations standards but violate societal
  norms

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Counterproductive Workplace Behavior (CWB)

• CWB is intentional/volitional behavior enacted by
  employees and viewed by the organization as
  contrary to its legitimate interests

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CWB and Leaders

• Researchers have tended to treat leaders and
  their behaviors as essentially distinct from
  those considered in existing CWB theories and
  models

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The Prevalence of CWB

• CWB has been recorded for workers of all types of
  organizations and for employees at all levels
  within them, whether they be salaried
  professionals or nonprofessionals, managers or
  non-supervisory employees

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Why Examine Leaders and CWB?

• Opportunities for serious misconduct are at least
  as great among managers and executives
• A handful of leaders engaging in CWB can do as
  much if not more damage than a large number of
  front-line workers

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Leaders and Ethics

• Ethical issues are ever present for leaders, who
  must continually face conflicting stakeholders,
  interests, and values

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Transformational Leadership

• Communicating a collective vision and inspiring
  their followers to look beyond self-interests and
  perform for the good of the group

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Transactional Leadership

• Controlling followers behaviors and handling
  problems by engaging in some transaction between
  the leader and subordinate

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What Makes an Unethical Leader?

• Frequently operate with egotistic intent
• Employ controlling versus empowering strategies
  to influence followers
• Fail to abstain from vices

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Taking a Broad View of CWB

• Allows researchers to generalize to unstudied but
  related behavior
• The possibility of a unified concept or dimension
  of CWB
• The possibility of finding common antecedents

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One View of CWB

• CWB can be grouped into broad categories
• Property Deviance - acquisition or damage of
  employer assets
• Production Deviance - violation of norms
  specifying the quality and quantity of work to be
  accomplished
• Interpersonal CWB Sexual harassment and verbal
  abuse

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A Recent Model of CWB

• CWB can be distinguished between behaviors
  targeted at the organization and behaviors
  targeted at organization members
• Further divided by behaviors directly related to
  job performance and behaviors not related to job
  performance

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What About Leaders?

• It seems likely that misconduct by leaders has
  elements in common with misconduct by others
• If leadership behavior is different, this
  represents an opportunity to expand the CWB
  construct

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Antecedents of CWB

• Considering both personality and environmental
  antecedents will be essential for a complete
  understanding of CWB

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Individual Difference as Antecedents

• Problems in socialization
• Attitudes regarding deviance and theft
• Problems with authority
• Excitement seeking
• Social influence
• Unstable upbringing
• Unmet needs

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Situational Influences as Antecedents

• Inflexible policies
• Organizational injustice
• Competitive environment
• Economic conditions
• Reward systems
• Adverse working conditions
• Organizational culture

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Environmental Factors

• Leaders have some control over the situational
  factors that might influence CWB therefore it is
  worth considering individual differences

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Individual Differences, Leadership, and CWB

• Integrity tests substantially predict CWB
• The big five personality variables of
  agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional
  stability are associated with CWB

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Perpetrators Explanations for Their CWB

• Denial of harm
• Unnecessary or unjust laws
• Achievement vital to economic goals or even
  survival
• Expectations and pressure from others
• Everybody else is doing it

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Guidelines for HR

• Train employees to reflect upon a proposed action
  or decision from another perspective

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Guidelines for HR Continued

• Consider some form of performance evaluation
  approach to enable others to focus not only on
  the numbers/financials produced by leaders, but
  also how they were met

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Guidelines for HR Continued

• Foster an ethical environment through
• Mechanisms for reporting and discussing perceived
  ethical issues/problems without fear of
  retribution
• Verification procedures for code-compliance
  during key activities

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Guidelines for HR Continued

• Senior leaders should be encouraged to share
  information publicly about important
  organizational decisions
• Senior officials should signal support for
  ethical values

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Reversing CWB

• External change agents are likely to be the most
  successful because
• They signal a break with the past and an
  intention to change for the future
• They bring with them a different perspective that
  promotes questions about long held practices

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Summary

• This chapter examined
• The construct of CWB
• Antecedents to CWB
• Leadership and CWB
• Environmental factors and CWB
• Guidelines to prevent CWB