Discrete Negative Emotions and Counterproductive Work Behavior

Abstract

The current study investigates how seven discrete negative emotions are related to seven dimensions of counterproductive work behavior (CWB). We surveyed 240 employed students about the frequencies of their negative emotions and CWBs over a 1-month time frame. Correlational analyses revealed that almost all emotions correlated significantly with all forms of CWB, but there were significant differences in the magnitude of correlations between emotion–CWB pairs. Furthermore, a series of multiple regression analyses suggested that there were different patterns in the emotions that accounted for unique variance across different forms of CWB. This study suggests that the understudied emotions of boredom and shame might be particularly important to our understanding of CWB.