Workgroup Climates and Employees’ Counterproductive Work Behaviours: A Social‐Cognitive Perspective

• Date: 01 March 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12167
• Published date: 01 March 2016
• Author: Grégoire Bollmann,Franciska Krings

Workgroup Climates and Employees’

Counterproductive Work Behaviours:

A Social-Cognitive Perspective

Gregoire Bollmann and Franciska Krings

Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Lausanne

ABSTRACT This research examines employees’ anticipation of social and self-sanctions as a

self-regulatory mechanism linking workgroup climates and counterproductive work behaviours

(CWBs) and personality as a limit to these effects. A cross-level study with 158 employees

from 26 workgroups demonstrated that in groups with a high compliance climate – a climate

emphasizing the importance of complying with organizational rules – employees anticipate

more social and self-sanctions, leading those low in conscientiousness and low in agreeableness

to engage less frequently in CWBs. In contrast, a high relational climate – a climate

emphasizing the importance of positive social relations over self-interest – indirectly unbridles

the CWBs of these employees by alleviating the social and self-sanctions they anticipate for

CWBs. Climates did not have indirect effects for employees high in agreeableness and high in

conscientiousness. These findings elucidate why workgroup climates do not affect the CWBs of

all members in the same way.

Keywords: agreeableness, conscientiousness, counterproductive work behaviours, social and

self-sanctions, workgroup climates

INTRODUCTION

Counterproductive work behaviours (CWBs), that is, purposeful and potentially harmful

acts targeting the organization (organizational CWBs), or people in the organization,

(interpersonal CWBs; Spector et al., 2006), have various negative consequences for indi-

viduals and teams (Detert et al., 2007; Hershcovis and Barling, 2010). Hence, under-

standing what contributes to CWBs is crucial. This research focuses on workgroup

climates, that is, group members’ shared understandings of events, practices, and proce-

dures, examining how they influence individual acts of CWBs and which individuals

they affect in particular.

Address for reprints:Gregoire Bollmann, National Centre of Competence in Research LIVEs, University of

Lausanne, Geopolis Building, Office 5793, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland (gregoire.bollmann@unil.ch).

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which

permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

[The copyright line for this article was changed on 22 February 2017 after original online publication.]

V

C2015 The Authors

Journal of Management Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd and

Society for the Advancement of Management Studies

Journal of Management Studies 53:2 March 2016

doi: 10.1111/joms.12167

Workgroups are ubiquitous in organizations today. Their impact on individuals is

vast and goes beyond that of leaders (Chiaburu and Harrison, 2008). Workgroups deter-

mine at least partially the valence people assign to CWBs (Bennett and Robinson, 2003;

Griffin and Lopez, 2005). As Barker (1993) tellingly described it, workgroups can for

example agree upon certain values and develop norms that constitute a powerful social

control, a ‘tighter iron cage’ than organizational surveillance systems. At the same time,

workgroups sometimes facilitate the CWBs of individual members through behavioural

norms, aggressive culture and norms of tolerance toward CWBs (e.g., Glomb and Liao,

2003; Restubog et al., 2012; for a review, Robinson et al., 2014), turning CWBs into a

unit-level phenomenon, under some circumstances (Brown and Trevino, 2006; Mayer

et al., 2009a).

Workgroup climates are one way through which workgroups influence the behaviours

of their members. Climates reigning within groups might however not always function

in the same way as individuals’ perceptions of them (i.e., psychological climates; Koz-

lowski and Klein, 2000). For example, individuals who perceive the climate as fostering

team spirit or friendliness manifest less CWBs and less unethical behaviours (i.e., cli-

mates of a benevolent type; for reviews, Kish-Gephart et al., 2010; Mayer, 2014). Con-

sequently, such climates have been suggested as one way to prevent the occurrence of

CWBs (e.g., Devonish, 2013). Yet, people perceiving support from their colleagues – a

characteristic of workgroup climates of the same type – actually manifest more CWBs

(Liao et al., 2004). More research is therefore necessary to understand whether and why

some climates reigning within groups could function differently and have unintended

negative consequences. An important avenue in this regard lies in the mechanisms link-

ing workgroup climates to individual behaviours; yet, there is a dearth of such research

(Mayer, 2014).

In addition, workgroup climates might not affect all members in the same way

(Chang et al., 2012; Christian et al., 2009), casting doubt on climate as a blanket mode

to curb individual behaviours. Most theoretical frameworks adopted by research on

workgroup antecedents of CWBs cannot fully explain why climates would have different

impacts on CWBs of individual members within the same group (e.g., Glomb and Liao,

2003; Robinson and O’Leary-Kelly, 1998). Yet, this is a crucial question, not only con-

sidering the deleterious effects one single negative member might have on the function-

ing of an entire group (Felps et al., 2006) but also to design effective interventions to

improve climates and their related outcomes (Naveh and Katz-Navon, 2015; Zohar and

Polachek, 2014).

In this paper, we draw from core arguments of Bandura’s (1991a, 1991b, 1999)

socio-cognitive theory of moral agency to examine how different workgroup climates

constrain or unbridle CWBs, that is, what explanatory mechanism links workgroup cli-

mates to individual acts of CWB, and whom, that is, which individuals in particular, cli-

mates influence by means of this mechanism. We propose that individual CWBs are

indirectly related to different dimensions of climate through self-regulation. Namely,

people anticipate more or less social and self-sanctions for CWBs depending on the

dimensions and level of climate reigning within the group. These anticipated sanctions,

in turn, influence to what extent individuals actually engage in CWBs. Yet, self-

regulatory mechanisms also operate in relation to personal standards that incline people

185Workgroup Climates and CWBS

V

C2015 The Authors

Journal of Management Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd and

Society for the Advancement of Management Studies