Impacts of Employee Workplace Deviant Behavior on Themselves: An Empirical Study Based on the Affective Events Theory

Abstract

Workplace deviant behavior refers to the behavior that employees intentionally implement, violate organizational norms, and threaten the well-being of their organization or other members in the organization.While most of researches focus on exploring the antecedents of workplace deviant behavior, we have limited knowledge about its consequences. In the very few studies on the outcomes of employee workplace deviant behavior, they mainly focus on recipients’ perspective and reveal the negative impacts of employee workplace deviant behavior on colleagues and organizations. From the actor-centric perspective, the research on the impacts of employee workplace deviant behavior on themselves has been seriously ignored. For this reason, by taking the actor-centric perspective, this paper explores how and when employee workplace deviant behavior affects their emotional and behavioral outcomes.Based on the affective events theory, this paper explores the negative impacts of workplace deviant behavior on employee work engagement and its dynamics. The primary tenet of affective events theory is that the events experienced by workers will affect their emotional state, which will in turn affect their attitudes and behaviors. Negative events in the workplace are important emotional events that affect their emotional state. Based on this theory, this paper proposes that, as a negative work event, employee workplace deviant behavior may lead to their negative emotions and then weaken their work engagement. Furthermore, individual characteristics will affect the emotional experience and cognitive assessment process after taking actions. Therefore, this paper proposes that, for the unethical behavior such as workplace deviant behavior, employees’ moral identity is an important boundary condition affecting the emotional and cognitive response of individuals to their own deviant behavior.In this study, we use the experience sampling method （ESM） by recruiting 67 participants to finish a research. By using the hierarchical linear model to analyze 323 daily observation data provided by 46 participants, the present study finds that employee workplace deviant behavior increases their negative affect and decreases work engagement. Moral identity plays a moderating role in the impacts of workplace deviant behavior on negative affect and work engagement, that is, the indirect effect of workplace deviant behavior on work engagement via negative affect is significant and negative for employees with high moral identity and does not exist for employees with low moral identity.This research makes several important theoretical contributions: First, by taking the actor-centric perspective, it explores the impacts of workplace deviant behavior on employees themselves. Second, it not only examines the potentially negative impacts of employee workplace deviant behavior on themselves, but also examines how and when the impacts unfold. Third, it finds a new behavioral factor that affects employee work engagement, and finds that employees’ unethical behaviors may also reduce employee work engagement by inducing their own negative affect.