Testing the Effects of Stressor Trajectory on Counterproductive Work Behavior

Abstract

Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) represents a significant threat to organizations and organizational stakeholders, such that understanding the processes driving employee engagement in deviant workplace behaviors is for essential for ensuring well-being at work. Although, evidence suggests that a variety of work stressors influence counterproductive behavior in the workplace the application of this research has been constrained by a lack of longitudinal studies, that investigate the relationship between stressors and CWB over time, and a failure to examine how within-person change in job stressors can influence between-person differences in CWB. Utilizing a random coefficient modeling (RCM) approach we seek to address this limitation by investigating how job stressor change or trajectory impacts employee CWB. Our dynamic research model explores how the strength and direction of changing job stressors (e.g., increasing or decreasing levels of stress) impacts both the frequency of employee CWB and CWB trajectory with a goal of enhancing our understanding of “why” and “when” employees are motivated to engage in CWB in response to changing work experiences. We also investigate the moderating effects of temporal focus (past, present, and future) and job preservation motivation on the relationship between stressor trajectory and CWB.