Chapter 7: Managing Organizational Deviance: Focusing on Causes, Not Symptoms

Organizations experience staggering expenses when employees break rules, behaviors that are variously referred to as acts of organizational deviance, counterproductive work behavior, or organizational misbehavior.¹ For example, conservative estimates place the annual cost of internal theft at $6 billion in the U.S. (Wimbush & Dalton, 1997); computer-based loafing behavior, or cyberloafing, costs $600 million annually in the United Kingdom (Taylor, 2007) and upwards of $5.3 billion in the United States (Bennett & Robinson, 2003); and recovery from acts of anger and violence in the workplace cost over $4 billion per year (Bensimon, 1997). It is not surprising that managers are highly motivated to identify ways to control employee deviance given these statistics, and a large body of practical, “self-help” books for managers has sprung up to meet this demand in the last decade (e.g., Bruce, Hampel, & Lamont, 2011; Falcone, 2009; Grote, 2006; Scott, 2006; Shepard, 2005).