J. Organiz. Behav. 25, 67–80 (2004)
Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/job.243
Workplace deviance, organizational citizenship behavior, and business unit performance: the bad apples do spoil the whole barrel
PATRICK D. DUNLOP1* AND KIBEOM LEE2
1
2
Summary
School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia, Australia
Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
The influences of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and workplace deviant behavior
(WDB) on business unit performance were investigated using data from branches of a fast food organization. Data included measures of …show more content…
For this reason, most staff members commence their work for the organization, which in many cases is their first job, while they are in the later years of their schooling. The organization offers a great deal of flexibility in terms of working hours, and consequently also attracts and employs many tertiary students seeking to supplement their incomes. The majority of staff members therefore typically do not regard their job in the organization as a ‘career job,’ but rather see it as a means to an end. This is reflected by the fact that the majority of staff members are employed on a part-time or casual basis and that turnover rates are fairly high.
While a small proportion of supervisors are employed on a casual basis, in order to be promoted in the organization supervisors need to be employed on a full-time basis. Many of the supervisors commence their tenure in the organization as staff members, although it is possible to complete a supervisory traineeship without first working as a staff member. Supervisor pay rates are largely determined as function of the position within the branch hierarchy, although some differences exist between branches. …show more content…
Of all the staff respondents, 62 per cent were female and the mean age was 17.2 (SD ¼ 3.2) years. The mean organizational tenure of staff was 2.0 years. Two pieces of information about the population (age and organizational tenure) available to us were found not to differ significantly from those obtained from the current sample (population mean age: 17.1 years and population mean organizational tenure: 1.56 years). Such low age and short tenure are not uncommon characteristics of fast food employees (e.g. Hollinger, Slora, & Terris, 1992).
The 96 responses obtained from supervisors represented 53.6 per cent of all supervisors working for the organization in Western Australia. Twenty-eight of the 36 branches provided responses from more than one supervisor, and in these cases supervisors’ responses were aggregated to form a branch-level team performance variable. Of all supervisor responses, 47 per cent were female and the mean age was
29.6 (SD ¼ 10.4) years. The mean organizational tenure of all supervisors was 6.25 years. The mean number of hours worked by the supervisors in the 4 weeks prior to the commencement of the study was
42 (SD ¼ 9).