Workplace Mistreatment and Employee Deviance: An Investigation of the Reciprocal Relationship Between Hostile Work Environments and Harmful Work Behaviors

This study examined responses from more than one thousand employed adults across the United States to shed light on the causal directions and temporal dynamics between, on the one hand, the hostile social situations employees face at work (i.e., workplace mistreatment) and, on the other hand, the harmful behaviors that employees enact at work. Using autoregressive cross-lagged panel analyses on a 12-wave longitudinal dataset, we show that employees’ bad behaviors at work (e.g., sabotage, theft, abuse of coworkers) are both a cause and a consequence of experiencing mistreatment from colleagues and supervisors (e.g., ostracism, everyday discrimination, abusive supervision). We investigate the temporal aspects of this reciprocal relationship and find that deviance-to-mistreatment and mistreatment-to-deviance effects both occur over a 1-week time horizon. Moreover, this reciprocal relationship continued across the 12 weeks of the study, and its magnitude neither intensified nor diminished over this time period. Finally, we investigated the role of moral character evaluations in the reciprocal mistreatment-deviance relationship. Our results revealed that individuals whose moral character is more positively regarded by coworkers (i.e., those evaluated as higher in honesty-humility) are less penalized by others in response to their deviance. We discuss theoretical and managerial implications of these results for mitigating deviance and mistreatment in organizations.