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Exploring the Relationships Between Perceived Coworker Loafing and Counterproductive Work Behaviors: The Mediating Role of a Revenge Motive

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationships between perceived coworker loafing and counterproductive work behaviors toward the organization (CWB-O) and toward the coworkers (CWB-I).

Design/Methodology/Approach

Data were collected from 184 supervisor–employee pairs from multiple sources (i.e., self-rated and supervisor-rated). Structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses were conducted to test our hypotheses.

Findings

The results of SEM showed that perceived loafing was positively related to CWB-O (self-rated) and CWB-I (self-rated and supervisor-rated). Moreover, a revenge motive toward the organization fully mediated the relationship between perceived loafing and CWB-O, whereas a revenge motive toward coworkers fully mediated the relationship between perceived loafing and CWB-I.

Implications

This study advances our understanding as to how and why perceived coworker loafing increases employees’ CWB-I and CWB-O. Our investigation also highlights the important cognitive mediator: revenge motive in the perceived loafing–CWB linkage.

Originality/Value

This is one of the first studies which examines the relationships between perceived coworker loafing and two facets of CWB, and investigates a cognitive mediator (i.e., a revenge motive) that underlines the perceived loafing–CWB linkage. In addition, we respond to Bennett and Robinson’s (J Appl Psychol 85:349–360, 2003) call to test the nomological network of CWB in a collectivist culture (i.e., Taiwan).

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Notes

  1. The term “sucker” is informally used to describe someone who is easily deceived.

  2. According to Bennett and Robinson (2000), Dalal (2005), and Fox et al. (2001), CWB can be categorized into two dimensions: organizationally directed CWB (CWB-O) and interpersonally directed CWB (CWB-I). We have adopted their categorization in this study.

  3. As 81 supervisors rated more than one employee, this raises the issue of data non-independence on supervisor-rated CWB (e.g., rater effects). Similarly, employee self-rated CWB could be influenced by the group effect (e.g., working within the same work context or for the same boss may have led to the similar levels of self-rated CWB). Therefore, we calculated the ICC(1) and r wg values for both supervisor-rated CWB-I (ICC[1] = .15, mean r wg = .95) and CWB-O (ICC[1] = .18, mean r wg = .98), and employee self-rated CWB-I (ICC[1] = .22, mean r wg = .96) and CWB-O (ICC[1] = .17, mean r wg = .97). These values suggested that the potential for non-independence problems in terms of supervisor-rated and self-rated CWB did exist. Thus, we conducted HLM to control the non-independence problem (i.e., rater effects and group effects) and then tested our model again. According to Hofmann and Gavin’s (1998) suggestions, we used the grand-mean centering method to center the Level-1 predictors and control for the Level-2 rater or group effects. The HLM results showed similar findings to the SEM results. Hence, the non-independence problem did not adversely influence our findings.

  4. Although it is useful to control negative affectivity (NA) in order to reduce the possibility of common method variances, Podsakoff et al. (2003) also suggest that controlling for NA might also partial out the meaningful variances between NA and other theoretically related variables. As such, we performed additional analyses that excluded NA from our final models. The results remained identical to our original findings.

  5. Those studies using different rating scale (e.g., five-point Likert scale) or different anchors (e.g., very agree to very disagree) were excluded in our comparison.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate Institute of Human Resource Management, National ChangHua University of Education, No. 2 Shi-Da Rd, ChangHua City, 500, Taiwan, ROC

    Tsang-Kai Hung & Wan-Lin Lu

  2. Department of Business Administration, National Chengchi University, 64, Section 2, Chih-Nan Road, Taipei, 116, Taiwan, ROC

    Nai-Wen Chi

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  1. Tsang-Kai Hung
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Correspondence to Nai-Wen Chi.

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Received and reviewed by former editor, George Neuman.

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Hung, TK., Chi, NW. & Lu, WL. Exploring the Relationships Between Perceived Coworker Loafing and Counterproductive Work Behaviors: The Mediating Role of a Revenge Motive. J Bus Psychol 24, 257–270 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-009-9104-6

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