When Unproductive Employee Behaviors are Ignored: Effects on Job Satisfaction

Abstract

Management’s failure to address performance problems is often the reality in public organizations and the costs of that may not be restricted to the lost productivity of poor-performing employees. In this article, we investigate the extent to which the job satisfaction of public employees may be negatively affected by the perception that unproductive employee behaviors (such as low productivity, poor quality of work, absenteeism, lateness, missing deadlines, etc.) are systematically ignored in their organizations. We propose that this effect is mediated by both perceived rewards and recognition received and employee-organization value congruence (a parallel mediation model). To test our hypotheses, we surveyed 256 government employees from varied public organizations in Brazil. In line with our predictions, we find that perceived organizational failure to address unproductive employee behaviors is negatively related to job satisfaction and that both perceived rewards received and value congruence mediate this effect.