Organization-discouraged or encouraged employee deviate behavior: a study of the typology and personal factors

It is commonly believed that employee deviant behavior should be suppressed by organizations. However, discrepancies may exist between an organization's explicit rules and its implicit norms (Argyris and Schön, 1996). This study therefore proposes a novel typology that categorizes employee deviant behavior into actions conforming to or deviating from organizational implicit norms-termed organization-encouraged and organization-discouraged employee deviant behavior, respectively. Each category is further classified into four dimensions-personal aggression, political deviance, property deviance, and production deviance-yielding eight types in total. The study examines how personal factors, including career stage and organizational integration (affective cognition, organizational commitment, perceived obligations, and beliefs in norms), influence these eight types of behavior.

A two-phase questionnaire survey was conducted. First, 100 working students described the most common deviant behaviors they had observed; these were combined with Robinson and Bennett's (1995) 45 deviant behavior types, then coded by three scholars using content analysis (Cohen's κ = 0.85; percentage agreement = 90%) to identify 20 typical behaviors. The survey targeted human resource managers of Taiwan's top 1,000 enterprises, measuring career stage, organizational integration, and behavioral tendencies toward each deviant type. After two rounds of follow-up reminders, 216 valid questionnaires were collected, with no evidence of nonresponse bias (p > 0.05).

Organizations were classified as encouraging (34.72%) or discouraging (65.28%) toward deviant behavior. Members of encouraging organizations exhibited significantly higher behavioral tendencies (M = 4.24) than those in discouraging organizations (M = 3.51; F = 18.04, p < 0.001). Across deviant types, encouraging organizations showed significantly higher tendencies in production, political, and personal aggression deviance, but not in property deviance. Regarding career stage, tenure, subordinate count, and income predicted higher tendencies toward organization-discouraged deviance in discouraging organizations, while education and income predicted higher tendencies toward organization-encouraged deviance in encouraging organizations. For organizational integration, perceived obligations (risk and cost perceptions) significantly influenced both types of deviant behavior, whereas affective cognition, organizational commitment, and beliefs in norms did not. Hypotheses 1 and 2 were partially supported; Hypothesis 3 was not supported; Hypothesis 4 was partially supported.

This study extends Robinson and Bennett's typology by integrating the espoused theory/theory-in-use distinction, demonstrating that implicit norms critically reshape how deviant behaviors are classified and evaluated. The partial support for hypotheses highlights the complexity of career-stage and organizational-integration effects, suggesting multiple mechanisms-socialization pressure, social learning, and perceived career risk. Practically, findings suggest that management should distinguish between organization-encouraged and organization-discouraged deviance rather than applying uniform disciplinary measures. Cross-sectional design and the Taiwanese context are limitations; future research should employ longitudinal and cross-cultural approaches.