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Predicting Counterproductive Work Behavior from Guilt Proneness

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Abstract

We investigated the relationship between guilt proneness and counterproductive work behavior (CWB) using a diverse sample of employed adults working in a variety of different industries at various levels in their organizations. CWB refers to behaviors that harm or are intended to harm organizations or people in organizations. Guilt proneness is a personality trait characterized by a predisposition to experience negative feelings about personal wrongdoing. CWB was engaged in less frequently by individuals high in guilt proneness compared to those low in guilt proneness, controlling for other known correlates of CWB. CWB was also predicted by gender, age, intention to turnover, interpersonal conflict at work, and negative affect at work. Given the detrimental impact of CWB on people and organizations, it may be wise for employers to consider guilt proneness when making hiring decisions.

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Notes

  1. In addition, the survey also included assessments of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and morality judgments of counterproductive and citizenship behaviors. Because those scales are not relevant to the current study, we do not discuss them further. Information about these measures are available from the authors upon request.

  2. The CWB-C items were embedded in a longer list of items that also included 20 organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) items (Fox et al. 2011) interspersed with the 32 CWB items. Because our research question concerned CWB rather than OCB, we do not discuss the OCB findings further (however, information is available from the authors upon request).

  3. Although the alpha level of .97 was particularly high, it is consistent with prior research using the CWB-C, which generally finds alpha levels of .90 or higher for the longer (45-item) CWB-C (see Paul Spector’s website for psychometric information about the scale: http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~pspector/scales/cwbcover.html). The authors of the CWB-C point out that the measure is behavior checklist (i.e., a causal indicator scale) containing items that are not parallel assessments of a single underlying construct (Spector et al. 2006). For this type of measure, internal consistency is not a good indicator of reliability (Bollen and Lennox 1991; Edwards and Bagozzi 2000). For further discussion of the limitations of internal consistency as an indicator of reliability, see McCrae et al. 2011; Schmitt 1996.

  4. Although the one-factor model had excellent fit, we also attempted to estimate a five-factor model of the CWB-C; however, factor scores could not be computed because the latent variable covariance matrix was not positive definite.

  5. In addition to analyzing total CWB-C scores, we analyzed each of the five CWB-C subscales separately (calculated as sum scores, rather than factor scores). The guilt proneness factor was significantly negatively correlated with each of the five subscales, ranging from r(389) = −.28, p < .001 for production deviance, to r(389) = −.22, p < .001 for theft.

  6. Although Conscientiousness has been found to predict CWB (Dalal 2005), Spector et al. (2010) found that the relationship is attenuated substantially when CWB is assessed with a frequency response scale rather than an agreement response scale.

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Acknowledgments

This research was made possible through the support of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and a grant by the Berkman Faculty Development Fund at Carnegie Mellon University. We also wish to thank the members of the Character Project at Wake Forest University for valuable feedback on this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA

    Taya R. Cohen & Nazli Turan

  2. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    A. T. Panter

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  1. Taya R. Cohen
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Correspondence to Taya R. Cohen.

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Cohen, T.R., Panter, A.T. & Turan, N. Predicting Counterproductive Work Behavior from Guilt Proneness. J Bus Ethics 114, 45–53 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-012-1326-2

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