Blame It on Individual or Organization Environment: What Predicts Workplace Deviance More?

Abstract

Deviant workplace behavior is one of the widely present employee behaviors that create significant organizational cost, create an unhealthy working environment, and lead to various social and psychological job- and non-job-related consequences. Although various personality, situational, and organizational factors have been analyzed as instigators of such behavior, literature calls for a more comprehensive approach that analyzes interaction and mutual effects of different sources of deviant behavior. This paper explores organizational culture and individual personality as the antecedents of deviant workplace behavior. A multilevel perspective is applied in empirical research that was done on a sample of 251 employees from 11 organizations in Croatia. Results of our research and hierarchical linear modeling imply that individual-related factors, namely, age and gender, as well as personality traits, are greater predictors of both individual and organizational deviance as opposed to organizational culture.