Job Dissatisfaction, Deviant Workplace Behavior, and Their Consequences

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Job Dissatisfaction, Deviant Workplace Behavior, and Their Consequences

Leadership and Organizational Behavior · Chapter 6: Workplace Attitudes, Job Satisfaction, and Organizational BehaviorSection 6.3 · lesson 35 of 12212 min · free with a free account

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In this lesson

What dissatisfied employees actually do, and which conditions decide it.

  • Map dissatisfaction responses with the EVLN model
  • Classify counterproductive work behavior by severity and target
  • Identify the predictors that make deviance likely
  • Trace the path from dissatisfaction to voluntary turnover

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Everything said in the video, section by section (1,438 words). Read along, or search it.

Workplace Attitudes, Job Satisfaction, and Organizational Behavior

Job Dissatisfaction, Deviant Behavior, and Their Consequences

The last subchapter was about what positive attitudes buy an organization. This one is about what negative attitudes cost it. And the first thing to fix is a common misreading. Dissatisfaction is not simply the absence of satisfaction. It is an active state, and active states produce behavior. We will map that behavior with a framework called E V L N. We will classify workplace deviance by how serious it is, and who it targets. We will identify what predicts it, and the answer is mostly about fairness. And we will follow the path from a first moment of dissatisfaction to a resignation letter. That path has several stages, and every stage is an opportunity to intervene.

Framing

Dissatisfaction Is an Active State

Begin with the framing, because it changes what you look for. Job dissatisfaction generates behavioral responses. Many of those responses are costly to the organization. They are costly to colleagues, and to the dissatisfied employees themselves. So a manager's question is not only how satisfied people are. It is what dissatisfied people are currently doing about it. Three bodies of work answer that. The E V L N framework maps the full range of responses available. Counterproductive work behavior research catalogs the forms deviance actually takes. And a set of predictors tells you which response a given employee will choose. That last piece is the practically useful one, because predictors are often controllable.

EVLN

Four Responses on Two Dimensions

The framework is called Exit, Voice, Loyalty, Neglect. It was developed by Albert Hirschman. It was extended to organizational contexts by Dan Farrell and Caryl Rusbult. Its power comes from sorting responses along two independent dimensions. The first dimension asks whether the response is active or passive. Does it involve direct behavioral action, or does it involve withdrawal? The second asks whether it is constructive or destructive. Does it aim to improve the situation, or to withdraw from it, or damage it? Voice is active and constructive. Exit is active and destructive. Loyalty is passive and constructive. Neglect is passive and destructive. And neglect is the most organizationally destructive of the four.

The Four Responses

Exit, Voice, Loyalty, Neglect

Exit means leaving, or preparing to leave, the organization. Resigning, transferring to another unit, or actively searching for a job. Voice means attempting to improve conditions through communication and advocacy. Raising concerns with management, filing a grievance, suggesting improvements. Loyalty means waiting for conditions to improve while staying a member. Staying put, trusting leadership to fix the problem, expressing public support. Neglect means allowing conditions to deteriorate through reduced effort and engagement. Chronic lateness, reduced effort, rising error rates, passive withdrawal. Be careful with the word loyalty here, because the everyday meaning misleads. In this model loyalty is a passive response to dissatisfaction. Staying and waiting. It is constructive only in one narrow sense. It does no damage while there is still time.

Prediction

Which Response an Employee Chooses

So what decides which of the four an employee picks? Research on the model has identified several predictors. Employees with high organizational commitment tend toward voice or loyalty. So do employees with strong positive prior experiences of the organization. Employees with high alternative employment opportunities are more likely to exit. The third predictor is the one managers most often miss. Employees with low power, or limited access to communication channels, turn to neglect. Frontline workers in highly hierarchical organizations are the classic case. They resort to neglect when voice feels futile. Which produces an uncomfortable conclusion about suppressing complaint. An organization that ignores voice is choosing among exit, loyalty and neglect. And neglect is the most destructive of those, and the hardest to see.

Design Implication

Voice Channels as a Performance Lever

That makes voice channels a design problem, not a courtesy. Their availability and credibility is not merely a matter of fairness. It is a strategic retention and performance lever. When employees believe that raising a concern produces a fair hearing, voice wins. It becomes the preferred response to dissatisfaction, because it seems likely to work. Channels are absent, inaccessible, or perceived as performative. Management listens, and then never acts on anything. Employees respond by shifting toward exit or neglect. And that shift is rational. So organizations that invest in credible, responsive feedback capture more constructive energy. And they lose less of it to withdrawal and counterproductive behavior.

CWB

Counterproductive Work Behavior

Now to the destructive end of the spectrum, and to a precise definition. Counterproductive work behavior is voluntary behavior violating significant organizational norms. In doing so it threatens the well-being of the organization, its members, or both. The word doing the work in that definition is voluntary. This is not accidental behavior, and it is not incompetence. Employees engaging in it are choosing to act against organizational interests. Typically in response to perceived injustice, to dissatisfaction, or to frustration. Bennett and Robinson's influential taxonomy splits it by target. Organizational behaviors are aimed at the firm. Theft, sabotage, deliberate slowdowns. Interpersonal behaviors are aimed at people. Harassment, bullying, malicious rumors. Both impose direct costs, like theft losses, property damage, and lost productivity. And indirect costs, which are usually larger and almost never measured. The impact on witnesses and co-workers, monitoring expense, reputational damage.

Typology

Robinson and Bennett's Four Quadrants

Robinson and Bennett refined this into a deviance typology with four quadrants. The dimensions are severity, from minor to serious, and target, organizational or interpersonal. Minor and organizational gives you production deviance. Leaving early, excessive breaks, deliberately working slowly, wasting resources. Serious and organizational gives you property deviance. Stealing, sabotaging equipment, accepting kickbacks, falsifying expense reports. Minor and interpersonal gives you political deviance. Gossiping, favoritism, blaming co-workers, competing in non-beneficial ways. Serious and interpersonal gives you personal aggression. Harassment, bullying, verbal abuse, endangering colleagues, physical violence. The value of the grid is that it separates problems that need very different responses.

Predictor One

Perceived Injustice

Counterproductive behavior is not randomly distributed across a workforce. Research identifies a consistent set of predictors, and one dominates. Perceived injustice is the single most consistent predictor across studies and contexts. It comes in three forms. Procedural injustice means unfair processes. Distributive injustice means unfair outcomes. Interactional injustice means disrespectful treatment. Organizational justice theory explains the mechanism. Employees continuously monitor the fairness of the treatment they experience at work. Perceptions of injustice motivate retaliatory or compensatory behavior, designed to restore equity. Consider an employee who believes they were unfairly passed over for promotion. They may sabotage a colleague's project, steal time or resources, or spread damaging information. From the inside, that does not feel like deviance. It feels like restoring a balance.

Predictors Two And Three

Negative Affect, and Weak Controls

The second predictor is attitudinal and dispositional. Job dissatisfaction predicts counterproductive behavior, and so does trait negative affect. That is a dispositional tendency toward negative emotional experiences. Both predict the milder forms most strongly. Production deviance and political deviance. Dissatisfied employees are less invested in organizational success. They are less concerned with the reputational and relational costs of deviant behavior. And they read organizational events through a lens of grievance and hostility. The third predictor is not about the person at all. It is about opportunity. Weak internal controls, limited monitoring, and diffuse accountability raise rates substantially. So do cultures that are permissive about minor norm violations. This is the broken windows principle, borrowed from criminology. Tolerating small violations signals that violations are acceptable, and standards erode community-wide.

The Antidote

A Just Climate Beats Surveillance

Given all that, what should an organization actually do? The evidence points somewhere many managers find counter-intuitive. The most effective strategy for preventing this behavior is not surveillance. And it is not punishment. It is a genuinely just organizational climate. Justice has three dimensions, and each does distinct work. Procedural justice means processes that are consistent, unbiased, accurate, correctable and representative. And note this finding. Employees who perceive fair procedures accept even unfavorable outcomes. Distributive justice means outcomes proportionate to contributions. Pay, assignments and recognition, consistent with equity principles. Interactional justice means dignity, respect, and adequate explanation. In every interpersonal interaction with managers and with the organization.

Absence And Exit

Absenteeism, Turnover, and the Sequence

Two behavioral consequences deserve their own treatment. Absence, and exit. Absenteeism is the failure of employees to report to work when scheduled. Research distinguishes voluntary from involuntary absence. Voluntary absence is motivated, reflecting dissatisfaction or avoidance of aversive conditions. Involuntary absence is genuine illness or personal emergency. Eliminating absence entirely is neither achievable nor desirable, since life happens. But high rates of voluntary absence signal a significant attitude problem. And attendance programs often fail. Monitoring and discipline alone rarely improve anything. It may actually worsen the organizational climate. Voluntary turnover is the most extreme expression of exit, and it follows a sequence. March and Simon described it. Dissatisfaction generates thoughts of leaving. Thoughts of leaving generate job search. Search produces alternatives. And acceptable alternatives produce the decision to go. Every one of those stages is a place a manager can still intervene.

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Leadership and Organizational Behavior carries a NCCRS credit recommendation. These universities work with NCCRS; some are UPI Study's signed partners. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.

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FAQ

Questions students ask us

About Job Dissatisfaction, Deviant Workplace Behavior, and Their Consequences

What is the Exit, Voice, Loyalty, Neglect model?
The Exit, Voice, Loyalty, Neglect (EVLN) model sorts responses to job dissatisfaction on two dimensions: active versus passive and constructive versus destructive. Albert Hirschman proposed exit, voice, and loyalty, and Dan Farrell and Caryl Rusbult added neglect when applying the model to employees. Voice, such as raising concerns, is active and constructive. Exit, such as quitting, is active and destructive. Loyalty, waiting for improvement, is passive and constructive. Neglect, such as reduced effort, is passive and destructive.
What are the four types of workplace deviance?
Robinson and Bennett's typology sorts workplace deviance by severity and by target. Production deviance is minor and aimed at the organization, such as leaving early or working slowly. Property deviance is serious and organizational, such as theft, sabotage, or falsified expense reports. Political deviance is minor and interpersonal, such as gossip, favoritism, or blaming co-workers. Personal aggression is serious and interpersonal, including harassment, bullying, verbal abuse, and violence.
What is the strongest predictor of counterproductive work behavior?
Perceived injustice is the most consistent predictor of counterproductive work behavior across studies. It takes three forms: procedural injustice, meaning unfair processes; distributive injustice, meaning unfair outcomes; and interactional injustice, meaning disrespectful treatment. Employees who feel wronged may retaliate to restore balance, for example by sabotaging a colleague after being passed over for promotion. Job dissatisfaction, trait negative affect, and weak controls also raise the risk.
What is the difference between voluntary and involuntary absenteeism?
Voluntary absence is a motivated choice not to come to work, often reflecting dissatisfaction or avoidance of unpleasant conditions, while involuntary absence comes from genuine illness or personal emergencies. Eliminating absence entirely is neither realistic nor desirable, but high voluntary absence signals a real attitude problem. Attendance programs that rely only on monitoring and discipline rarely help and can worsen the climate, because they treat the symptom rather than the cause.

About the Leadership and Organizational Behavior course

How many college credits is Leadership and Organizational Behavior?
Leadership and Organizational Behavior (Business 206) carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.
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