Krischer Penney & Hunter 2010
Krischer Penney & Hunter 2010
Emily M. Hunter
University of Houston
Baylor University
The goal of our study was to determine whether some forms of counterproductive work behavior
(CWB) may serve to benefit employees. Building on the stressorstrain framework and theories
of coping, we investigated whether two forms of CWB, production deviance and withdrawal,
serve as a means of coping to mitigate the impact of low distributive and procedural justice on
emotional exhaustion. Results from a survey of 295 employed persons from around the United
States suggest that production deviance and withdrawal may benefit employees by reducing
emotional exhaustion in the face of low distributive justice but not necessarily low procedural
justice.
Keywords: counterproductive work behavior, coping, burnout, justice
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these costly behaviors. Most theories of CWB, including the stressor emotion model (Spector & Fox,
2005) and causal reasoning theory (Martinko, Gundlach, & Douglas, 2002), describe an affective event
process wherein an individuals subjective appraisal
of a workplace event results in a negative emotional
experience that in turn motivates an act of CWB.
Thus, these theories describe employee CWB as a
reaction to aversive environmental and emotional
experiences. Neuman and Baron (2005) present
CWB in a general aggression framework and argue
that employees perform acts of CWB either as a
reaction to a provocative event (i.e., hostile) or to
obtain some desired end (i.e., instrumental). Hostile
motives are consistent with affect-driven theories;
however, few studies have examined potential instrumental motives of CWB (notable exceptions include
Bies, Tripp, & Kramer, 1997; Folger & Skarlicki,
2005).
Diefendorff and Mehta (2007) argued that the neglect of individual motivation represents a serious
gap in CWB research. Whereas destructive at the
organizational level, individuals may experience
some benefit as a result of performing CWB that
encourages these behaviors. According to Penney
and Spector (2007), theories of emotion regulation
and coping provide an alternative perspective on the
instrumental use of CWB by suggesting that some
employee CWB may be performed as an attempt to
cope with stressful situations at work and reduce the
experience of negative emotions. Coping refers to the
cognitive and behavioral steps taken by individuals in
response to perceived demands or stressors (Lazarus
& Folkman, 1984). Stressors typically result in employee strain (e.g., emotional exhaustion, Ito &
Brotheridge, 2003), and successful coping buffers the
negative impact of stressors and reduces strain. Although CWB has not been studied in relation to
coping, some coping behaviors could be considered
counterproductive from an organizations perspective. For example, employee withdrawal (e.g., taking
longer breaks than allowed) may reflect attempts by
employees to limit their exposure to stressful situations and prevent subsequent strain. Production deviance (e.g., intentionally working slowly) may serve
as a strategy to gain control over stressors and the
accompanying negative emotional reactions. In spite
of the similarities between some CWB and coping,
no studies to date have examined whether employees
use CWB as a coping mechanism to prevent strain
outcomes. Therefore, the purpose of the current study
was to examine CWB within a coping framework to
determine whether certain types of CWB mitigate the
impact of job stressors on a common psychological
strain: emotional exhaustion.
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Organizational Justice
The lack of organizational justice is one of the
most commonly researched workplace stressors and
one of the strongest predictors of CWB (Berry, Ones,
& Sackett, 2007). Organizational justice refers to the
perceived fairness of the interactions between individuals and organizations. Two of the most widely
studied forms of organizational justice are distributive and procedural justice. Distributive justice refers
to the perceived fairness of reward allocation (i.e., the
extent to which ones pay reflects the work that one
has completed), whereas procedural justice refers to
the perceived fairness of the processes by which
decisions are made (i.e., the extent to which decisions
are based on accurate information, made without
bias). Although other forms of justice are also discussed in the extant literature (e.g., interpersonal and
informational; Colquitt, 2001), we focus on perceptions of distributive and procedural justice because
these forms are often perceived as discretionary activities on the part of the organization as opposed to
individual supervisors (Fasolo, 1995; Moorman,
Blakely, & Niehoff, 1998; Shore & Shore, 1995) and
therefore are more likely to be perceived by employees as outside the scope of their direct influence. A
growing body of research has linked low levels of
justice with poor psychological and physiological
outcomes (e.g., Vermunt & Steensma, 2005), including emotional exhaustion (Tepper, 2000) and absenteeism (De Boer, Bakker, Syroit, & Schaufeli, 2002).
Therefore, in line with previous research evidence,
we propose the following hypothesis:
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Method
Participants and Procedure
We recruited participants through the StudyResponse Project (2004), an online research participant
panel with more than 95,000 participants. Researchers at Syracuse University designed this tool to provide social scientists with a means of conducting
Web-based surveys with large, diverse samples.
StudyResponse participants volunteer to be contacted
for participation (Stanton & Weiss, 2002), and samples collected with this tool have been used in several
recently published studies (e.g., Harris, Anseel, &
Lievens, 2008; Piccolo & Colquitt, 2006).
Based on the participant requirements that we provided (e.g., full-time employed adults living in the
United States), StudyResponse e-mailed the initial
recruitment notice, which included a brief description
of the study, including time requirements, incentives
offered (entry into a random drawing to receive one
of 20 $50 gift certificates), and a link to the Webbased survey, followed by a reminder e-mail 1 week
later to a random sample of 988 individuals in their
participant pool; 522 individuals responded (52.8%).
However, we dropped 124 cases because of responses to two items designed to detect nonconscientious responding (e.g., This item for key purposes
only. Please select Agree.). We dropped an additional 103 cases because of substantial missing data,
leaving 295 usable cases.
Participants (44.5% men and 92% Caucasian)
worked in a wide variety of jobs in a broad range of
industries, including education, law enforcement,
technology, government, transportation, finance, and
health care. They ranged in age from 21 to 67 years
(M 40.6 years) and in job tenure from 2 months to
37 years (M 7.18 years); 16.0% had a high school
diploma, 35.8% had an associates degree or some
college, 26.2% had a bachelors degree, 3.4% had
completed some graduate work, 8.8% had a masters
degree, and 4.8% had an advanced degree (5% did
not respond to the question). Although we requested
that participants work full-time, 20.8% worked parttime (40 hr/week). We compared mean scores of
participants working full- versus part-time for each of
Measures
Justice. Distributive justice was assessed with
Price and Muellers (1986) six-item scale (e.g.,
Please rate the extent to which you are fairly rewarded considering the responsibilities that you
have) using a scale of 1 (very unfairly) to 5 (very
fairly; .94). Procedural justice was measured
with Moormans (1991) 12-item scale (e.g., When
decisions about other employees in general or you in
particular are made in this company, the decisions are
applied with consistency to the parties affected)
using a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly
agree; .95).
CWB. The Counterproductive Work Behavior
Checklist (CWB-C; Spector et al., 2006) contains
three items for production deviance (e.g., Purposely
did your work incorrectly; .66) and four items
for withdrawal (e.g., Came to work late without
permission; .69). The checklist uses a response
scale of 1 (never) to 5 (every day). Although the
coefficient alphas for these subscales are below accepted standards, the subscales of the CWB-C are
considered causal indicator scales in which individual items are not interchangeable indicators of the
underlying construct. Causal indicator scales, including measures of CWB and socioeconomic status,
often result in lower estimated reliabilities because
individual items define the construct rather than acting as a reflection of an underlying construct (Spector
et al., 2006).
Emotional exhaustion. Emotional exhaustion
was assessed using six items from the Job-Related
Affective Well-Being Scale (JAWS; Van Katwyk,
Fox, Spector, & Kelloway, 2000). The JAWS assesses employees emotional reactions to their job by
presenting a list of emotions, both positive and negative, and asking respondents to indicate how frequently they have experienced each over the past 30
days using a 5-point scale of 1 (never) to 5 (always).
Because the JAWS is not typically used to assess
emotional exhaustion, we asked two subject-matter
experts (a PhD I/O psychologist and an advanced
graduate student in I/O psychology) to read a brief
description of emotional exhaustion, along with
items from the Maslach Burnout Inventory (Maslach,
Jackson, & Leiter, 1996) and identify items from the
JAWS that fit the construct definition of emotional
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Table 1
Scale Intercorrelations and Alpha Coefficient Reliabilities
Variable
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Distributive justice
Procedural justice
Production deviance
Withdrawal
Emotional exhaustion
(.94)
.62
.01
.00
.38
(.95)
.01
.03
.41
(.66)
.54
.27
(.69)
.13
(.90)
Note. N 295. Reliability coefficients are presented along the main diagonal.
p .05. p .01.
Results
Intercorrelations and descriptive statistics of study
variables are presented in Table 1. Hypothesis 1 was
supported as both distributive and procedural justice
were negatively correlated with emotional exhaustion
(rs .38 and .41, respectively, ps .01). Hypotheses 2 and 3 predicted that production deviance
and withdrawal, respectively, would moderate the
relationship between justice perceptions and emotional exhaustion such that the relationships are
weaker when CWB is frequent compared with infre-
Table 2
Hierarchical Regression Results
Variable
Age
Gender
Tenure
Hours per week
Production deviance
Withdrawal
Distributive justice
Procedural justice
R2
Distributive Justice Production Deviance
Procedural Justice Production Deviance
Distributive Justice Withdrawal
Procedural Justice Withdrawal
R2
Change in R2
Model I
.11
.07
.02
.11
.10
.67
.25
.50
Model II
.11
.03
.03
.12
.07
.53
.25
.24
.26
.01
.25
.00
Note. Standardized regression coefficients are presented from Step 3 in each model.
p .05. p .01.
Model III
Model IV
.14
.04
.01
.09
.13
.002
.02
.11
.30
.77
.19
.19
.60
.21
.02
.64
.21
.42
.22
.01
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Emotional Exhaustion
1
Low
Production
Deviance
Med
Production
Deviance
High
Production
Deviance
0.5
0
-0.5
-1
-1.5
Low
High
Distributive Justice
Discussion
Leveraging the stressorstrain model and theories
of coping, we investigated whether two forms of
CWB, production deviance and withdrawal, mitigate
the impact of low perceived justice on employee
emotional exhaustion. We replicated past research
indicating that individuals who experience low jus-
Emotional Exhaustion
2
1.5
Low
Withdrawal
Med
Withdrawal
High
Withdrawal
1
0.5
0
-0.5
-1
-1.5
Low
High
Distributive Justice
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Emotional Exhaustion
1.5
1
Low
Withdrawal
Med
Withdrawal
High
Withdrawal
0.5
0
-0.5
-1
-1.00
Low
High1.00
Procedural Justice
sources. Our results support our assertions and indicate that the relationships between both distributive
and procedural justice and emotional exhaustion are
weaker among employees who engage in high as
opposed to low levels of withdrawal. Thus, withdrawal behaviors, by minimizing employees exposure to unjust treatment by their employing organization, may protect employees from the strain of
emotional exhaustion.
We expected production deviance to function as
emotion-focused coping to reduce emotional exhaustion by increasing employees perceived control by
evening the score in the face of injustice (Adams,
1963), thereby reducing psychological strain. However, our hypothesis was only supported for distributive justice. When employees feel that the rewards
and outcomes they receive are distributed unfairly,
deliberately performing work slowly or incorrectly
may enable them to reduce their inputs to restore
equity, thereby reducing the negative emotions associated with low distributive justice.
Unexpectedly, our results suggest that production
deviance may not be an effective coping mechanism
with respect to procedural justice. One possible explanation is that employees may derive perceptions
of distributive justice from bonuses or pay raises,
which are generally discrete events that occur on an
annual basis. Thus, reducing inputs via acts of production deviance may be sufficient to restore the
inequity resulting from these relatively discrete
events, as well as restore employees sense of control. However, procedural justice perceptions may
not be based on discrete events. According to Lev-
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Conclusion
This study served as an initial investigation into
the possible instrumental use of engaging in certain
CWB as a means of coping with job stressors. Although additional research is needed to replicate our
findings, withdrawal and production deviance appear
to reduce employee emotional exhaustion when employees are faced with an uncontrollable stressor (i.e.,
low justice). Because emotional exhaustion has been
linked to lowered employee motivation, engagement,
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