Sabotage in the workplace: The role of organizational injustice

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Abstract

This study examines the relationship between injustice and workplace sabotage. Drawing on the organizational justice and workplace deviance literatures, we hypothesize that injustice will be the most common cause of sabotage, and that the source of injustice will influence the goal, target, and severity of sabotage behavior. The results generally support our hypotheses. First, injustice was the most common cause of sabotage. Second, when the source of injustice was interactional, individuals were more likely to engage in retaliation, and when the source of injustice was distributive, individuals were more likely to engage in equity restoration. Third, the source of injustice and the target of sabotage were generally the same, although this relationship was stronger for organizational targets than for individual targets. Finally, there was an additive effect of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice on the severity of sabotage. We discuss the implications of these results for future research on sabotage and deviant workplace behavior.

Introduction

I worked at the Janacka machine, which cuts the hides and skin off the pineapple. We usually worked a straight ten-hour shift, so a lot of people would just burn out. To combat that, people would try to get more breaks—we were only allowed two breaks per shift. To do this, they would send a pineapple down the wrong direction, or send a glove down, and it would break the whole machine. If the Janacka machine shuts down, you can't cut the pineapple, the line can't go on. The whole production line shuts down. It takes at least three hours to fix, so you're getting paid for three hours at least for just sitting around. Lance, pineapple packer. (Sprouse, 1992, p. 18)

Workplace sabotage has been of interest to a broad range of researchers and practitioners. The present study builds from this previous work and focuses on the relationship between perceived unfairness and sabotage behavior. We draw on the organizational justice and workplace deviance literatures as a basis for our research, in which we propose that the principal cause of sabotage is perceptions of organizational injustice. Additionally, we propose that different configurations of distributive, procedural, and interactional injustice lead to different types of sabotage behavior.

Organizational justice is a promising perspective for understanding workplace deviance (Greenberg & Alge, 1998). A number of scholars have theorized about how different types and combinations of injustice lead to dysfunctional consequences (Folger and Baron, 1996, Folger and Skarlicki, 1998, Giacalone and Greenberg, 1997, Greenberg, 1990, Greenberg, 1993a, Greenberg, 1993b, Greenberg and Alge, 1998, Neuman and Baron, 1997, Skarlicki and Folger, 1997). However, although there has been substantial theorizing about justice and deviance, few empirical studies exist, and those that do suffer from two limitations. First, the extant empirical justice research has focused on relatively few dysfunctional behaviors, primarily theft (Greenberg, 1990, Greenberg, 1993a, Greenberg, 1993b) and retaliation (Skarlicki & Folger, 1997). We believe it is useful to study a wider set of deviant behaviors. Such expansion is instrumental in developing a better understanding of contextual influences and boundary conditions on the causes of deviant behavior. In the present paper, we extend previous work by examining a broad category of deviance, workplace sabotage.

An additional characteristic of most of the relevant empirical work is that it has been relatively coarse-grained, examining the effect of injustice (distributive, procedural, and/or interactional) on whether or not employees engage in a specific act of deviance, such as theft. Research does not consider how different types of injustice may affect the type of deviance in which an individual engages. Here, we match this multidimensional perspective on justice (distributive, procedural, and interactional) with a more fine-grained image of deviance. Specifically, we describe how types of injustice affect the goal, target, and severity of sabotage behavior.

Below, we briefly review relevant research and present a series of hypotheses outlining the relationships between justice and sabotage. We then describe a study that examines these relationships between justice and sabotage and discuss the implications of our findings.

Section snippets

Sabotage

Workplace sabotage is behavior intended to “damage, disrupt, or subvert the organization's operations for the personal purposes of the saboteur by creating unfavorable publicity, embarrassment, delays in production, damage to property, the destruction of working relationships, or the harming of employees or customers” (Crino, 1994, p. 312). Most recent research argues for conceptualizing sabotage as a rational behavior that stems from an individual's reaction to his or her environment (Analoui,

Sabotage as a form of deviance

Recently there has been increased interest in deviant behavior in the workplace. (See Robinson & Bennett, 1997, and Robinson & Greenberg, 1998, for reviews.) Topics in this stream of research include workplace aggression (Baron and Neuman, 1996, Folger and Baron, 1996), incivility (Andersson & Pearson, 1999), revenge (Bies & Tripp, 1998), theft (Greenberg, 1990, Greenberg, 1993b, Greenberg, 1996, Hollinger and Clark, 1983), organization-motivated aggression (O'Leary-Kelly, Griffin, & Glew, 1996

Procedure

The 132 first-person accounts of sabotage activities in the book Sabotage in the American workplace: Anecdotes of dissatisfaction, mischief, and revenge. (Sprouse, 1992) served as data for the study. These accounts are self-reports, typically 200–800 words in length, from individuals interviewed by Sprouse. Sprouse's sample is not a scientific one. To identify subjects he distributed fliers, placed ads in newspapers, received referrals from friends, and friends of friends. The book only

Results

Our first hypothesis examined the prevalence of injustice as a cause of sabotage behavior. The results support the hypothesis. Perceived injustice was the most frequent cause of sabotage behavior; it was more frequent than all of the other causes combined (χ2=4.72, df=1, p<.05). The frequencies for the causes are shown in Table 2. Of the 122 scenarios, injustice was identified as the cause for 73. The second most common cause was powerlessness, followed by boredom/fun, frustration, and

Discussion

This study examined the relationship between injustice and sabotage behavior. In general, the results supported our hypotheses. As predicted, injustice was the most common cause of sabotage behavior. Also, distributive injustice was associated with sabotage behavior aimed at restoring equity, while interactional injustice was associated with retaliatory sabotage behavior. Whereas the source of the injustice (structural or social) affected the target of the sabotage (organization or individual),

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