[28] Some examples of this unverified information include rumors, gossip, false beliefs, and unsupportable explanations and justifications.
[34] Factors that might cause knowledge hiding are for example: leadership, workspace stressors, personality traits and psychological ownership.
Playing dumb occurs when an employee pretends that they do not have the discussed knowledge or they ignore relevant information available for them.
[37] At the individual level, knowledge hiding causes distrust and isolates employees from mutual idea exchange.
Rationalized and evasive knowledge hiding might cause short-term victories and enhance innovative job performance.
Management can prevent knowledge hiding by giving active encouragement to the employees and by creating a collaborative, open and discussion-oriented workplace.
[44] Despite this, it has negative consequences on organizational level such as time waste, failed or delayed projects, lost clients, unnecessary expenses, hiring costs, understaffing or poor quality of products and services.
[41] For example, a work culture that puts employees in a competitive position against each other contributes to the occurrence of information sabotage.
[46] Other workers may experience psychological effects of the tardy employee including morale and motivational problems as they attempt to "pick up the slack.
Lloyd C. Harris and Emmanuel Ogbonna from Cardiff University drew from employee deviance and dysfunctional behaviors studies to conceptualize service sabotage as a disturbing phenomenon in the work place.
[52] Sexual harassment is defined as "unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical contact when (a) submission to the conduct by the employee is either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual's employment, (b) submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as a basis for employment decisions affecting the individual and/or (c) such conduct [that] has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with work performance, or creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive working environment."
[56] Many organizations use integrity tests during the initial screening process for new employees in an effort to eliminate those considered most likely to commit theft.
Research on voluntary employee job turnover has attempted to understand the causes of individual decisions to leave an organization.
[62] Recent research highlights that aggressive goal-setting strategies can contribute to counterproductive work behavior (CWB) by fostering unethical practices, excessive risk-taking, and disengagement.
According to Ordoñez, Schweitzer, Galinsky, and Bazerman (2009), when employees are given overly specific or excessively challenging goals, they may engage in deceptive tactics, unethical decision-making, and risk-prone behaviors to meet expectations.
For example, past corporate scandals, such as those at Enron and Sears, illustrate how unrealistic performance targets pressured employees into fraudulent activities and unethical sales practices.
Furthermore, the study suggests that goal fixation can narrow employees' focus, causing them to neglect broader ethical considerations and long-term organizational well-being.
To mitigate these risks, organizations should implement balanced goal-setting frameworks that encourage ethical behavior, foster intrinsic motivation, and provide adequate oversight to prevent CWBs from emerging as a byproduct of misaligned performance incentives.
The variety of journals reporting in the area of CWBs reflects the breadth of the topic and the global interest in studying these behaviors.
[80] The lack of accurate measures for CWBs jeopardizes the ability of researchers to find the relationships between CWB and other factors they are evaluating.
[74] Other research has found that general mental ability is largely unrelated to self-reports of CWBs including theft (although a weak link to incidents of lateness was detected).
[80] Contradictions in the findings may be explained in the differential effects between measures of cognitive ability and self-reported versus detected incidents of CWBs.
[90] Overall perceptions of unfairness may particularly elicit interpersonal counterproductive work behaviors such as political deviance and personal aggressions.
With regard to the Big Five personality traits (conscientiousness, agreeableness, extroversion and openness to experience) all predict counterproductive behaviors.
Like, conscientiousness, self-control, or internal control, is seen as a stable individual difference that tends to inhibit deviant behaviors.
These additional findings are consistent with research that tends to show older employees exercise a greater level of self-control.
Some examples of stable characteristics that have been demonstrated to have relationships with CWBs include conscientiousness and agreeableness,[55] motivation avoidance,[77] cognitive ability,[84] and self-control.
[100] Maintaining communications and feedback, allowing participation of employees, and supervisory training are other suggestions for mitigating CWBs.
[101] Organizations must also pay close attention to employees for signs and sources of interpersonal conflicts so that they can be identified and tended to as necessary.
There is at least one set of researchers that suggest that production deviance (withholding effort) and withdrawal can be a benefit to employees by allowing them to relieve tension in certain circumstances.