Predicting Employee Engagement in Low and High Severity Counterproductive Work Behavior

Abstract

Counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs) have the potential to cause significant harm in the workplace. Because of the considerable threat CWBs pose to organizational and employee well-being, a literature has emerged to better understand the structure of these behaviors and identify the factors and conditions that effect employee engagement in counterproductive acts. While past research has distinguished between types of CWBs less attention has been paid to the specific forms these behaviors take including variation in behavioral severity. The current study introduces a novel conceptualization of CWB severity that distinguishes between intra-behavioral differences and develops modified versions of the CWB-C (Spector et al., 2006) which assess engagement in low and high severity CWBs. These measures are utilized to test a hypothesized model of CWB severity that predicts how individual (negative affect and self-control) and contextual factors (consequences) interact to predict low and high severity CWBs.