Feeling insulted? Examining end‐of‐work anger as a mediator in the relationship between daily illegitimate tasks and next‐day CWB

• Date: 01 October 2018
• Author: Danielle R. Wald,Erin M. Eatough,Zhiqing E. Zhou
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2266
• Published date: 01 October 2018

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Feeling insulted? Examining end‐of‐work anger as a mediator in

the relationship between daily illegitimate tasks and next‐day

CWB

Zhiqing E. Zhou

1

|Erin M. Eatough

2

|Danielle R. Wald

2

1

School of Psychology, Florida Institute of

Technology, Melbourne, Florida, U.S.A

2

Department of Psychology, Baruch College

and The Graduate Center, City University of

New York, New York City, New York, U.S.A

Correspondence

Zhiqing E. Zhou, School of Psychology, Florida

Institute of Technology, 150 West University

Boulevard, Melbourne, FL 32901, USA.

Email: zzhou@fit.edu

Summary

In this daily diary study, we investigated the within‐person relationship between daily illegitimate

tasks and next‐day counterproductive work behavior (CWB). We explored a moderated mediation

model where the link between illegitimate tasks and CWB is mediated by daily end‐of‐work anger,

with daily time pressure moderating the relationship between illegitimate tasks and end‐of‐work

anger. We collected data from 114 full‐time employees across 10 consecutive working days.

Results showed that within individuals, daily illegitimate tasks positively predicted next‐day

CWB, and the relationship was mediated by daily end‐of‐work anger. Further, daily time pressure

moderated the relationship between daily illegitimate tasks and daily end‐of‐work anger with the

relationship being stronger when daily time pressure was high.

KEYWORDS

anger, CWB, daily diary,illegitimate tasks, time pressure

1|INTRODUCTION

Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) is known as “employees'

volitional acts that harm or are intended to harm organizations or peo-

ple in organizations”(CWB; Spector & Fox, 2005, p. 151) and consists

of various forms of workplace misbehaviors including sabotage, with-

drawal, production deviance, theft, and abuse (Spector, Fox, Penney,

et al., 2006). CWB is an important issue in the workplace, costing orga-

nizations millions of dollars annually (Camara & Schneider, 1994; Vardi

& Weitz, 2004). Given the prevalence and negative consequences of

CWB, it is important to understand when and why employees engage

in these behaviors. As such, extensive work has been done in this

direction (Zhou, Meier, & Spector, 2014). In particular, researchers

have examined various workplace stressors as distal predictors of

negative emotions that are proximal antecedents of CWB (e.g., Fox,

Spector, & Miles, 2001; Sakurai & Jex, 2012; Spector & Fox, 2002;

Yang & Diefendorff, 2009). However, much of this past work has

examined these linkages using cross‐sectional between‐person designs

(Matta, Erol‐Korkmaz, Johnson, & Biçaksiz, 2014; Spector & Fox,

2005), provoking researchers to call for more within‐person studies

on predictors of CWB (Yang & Diefendorff, 2009).

The current study examines illegitimate tasks—work tasks that

employees feel they “should not have to do”because they are perceived

to fall outside of one's work role (Semmer, Jacobshagen, Meier, &

Elfering, 2007)—as a potential daily antecedent of CWB, and extends

our knowledge of the underlying process by exploring daily end‐of‐

work anger as a mediator and daily time pressure as a moderator in this

relationship. In doing so, the study makes several contributions to the

literature. First, previous findings examining work stressors (e.g., inter-

personal conflict and organizational constraints) as predictors of CWB

(Hershcovis et al., 2007) mainly used cross‐sectional between‐person

designs (Matta et al., 2014; Spector & Fox, 2005) from which conclu-

sions generally indicate that experiences of workplace stressors over a

period of time have an accumulated effect on CWB, overlooking the

within‐person fluctuation of CWB and factors that affect it (Judge,

Scott, & Ilies, 2006; Matta et al., 2014). This limitation is critical because

CWB tends to vary across time within individuals. For example, Judge

et al. (2006) reported that 53.1% of the variance in CWB is within indi-

viduals, further indicating the importance of examining the stressor–

CWB relationship using within‐person designs. Examining the daily

fluctuation of employee CWB can aid in uncovering the short‐term

effects of workplace stressors on CWB and allows for the ability to

examine short‐term emotional processes explaining these links.

However, the literature in this direction is still scarce.

The limited number of previous within‐person studies on CWB

have found that daily perceived ambiguity, perceived supervisor

Received: 19 March 2016 Revised: 23 December 2017 Accepted: 26 December 2017

DOI: 10.1002/job.2266

J Organ Behav. 2018;39:911–921. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job 911