# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Counterproductive Work Behaviours (CWB) definition

Counterproductive work behaviour refers to actions by employees that go against the goals and aims of their employer. CWB is not necessarily malicious but it is always conscious - it doesn't include accidental or unconscious behaviours or incidents. The driving forces behind counterproductive work behaviour can be very broad and include environmental reasons, lack of training, employee personality and life changes and external factors.

Typologies are used to identify and classify CWB in the workforce. One typology, by Robinson and Bennett (1995), uses the following four categories:

1. Production deviance e.g. tardiness or goldbricking

2. Property deviance e.g. theft or sabotage of equipment

3. Political deviance e.g. gossiping or favouritism

4. Personal aggression e.g. sexual harassment or workplace bullying

CWBs do not include unethical or illegal behaviours that contribute to an organisation's goals, such as an investment banker using insider trading to increase the bank's profit - this would form part of unethical pro-organisational behaviours (UPBs).

Perceptions of fairness in the workplace have been found to be strong drivers of counterproductive work behaviours - if a supervisor is perceived to have been unfair then the employee may in future 'forget' to flag up a potential issue to the supervisor so that the supervisor gets in trouble if the issue becomes severe.

Strategies used to manage counterproductive work behaviours (CWB) in the workplace are common at the recruitment stage, where companies use procedures like integrity screening and personality screening to identify individuals who may have a history of propensity to CWBs. Among incumbents, one of the biggest ways to reduce the incidence of CWBs in the workplace is by enhancing organisational justice and balancing perceptions of fairness.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What are Counterproductive Work Behaviours (CWB)?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Counterproductive Work Behaviours (CWB) definition Counterproductive work behaviour refers to actions by employees that go against the goals and aims of their employer. CWB is not necessarily malicious but it is always conscious - it doesn't include accidental or unconscious behaviours or incidents.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to start changing an unhealthy work environment | Glenn D. Rolfsen | TEDxOslo

# data[].attributes.body
The article gives an in depth look of the factors that go into an employee being counterproductive. It also gives reasons why they are being this way and how to fix these issues to ensure a better work environment.

# data[].attributes.body
This Ted talk was actually interesting. It is about how to trick ourselves into good behavior. It is not necessarily designated for the workplace but the functions can make us better which will then spill into the work setting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bob Nease: How to trick yourself into good behavior

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By now, we all know that people make lousy decisions and behave badly. We eat the cake, wait until the last minute to do our taxes, and generally work against our own self-interest no matter how much we want to succeed. So...what can we do to fight it?

# data[].attributes.body
This article gives a lot of great insights on how to become a better worker overall.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What is counterproductive work behavior?

Work behavior in an organizational or business setting is behavior exhibited by employees or other individuals involved in a workforce who can have a noticeable influence on the productivity of an individual, a group of individuals, and a company. Positive forms of work behavior include behavior such as amiability, generosity, and other forms of positive social behavior that contribute to a positive work environment as well as to productivity. Work behavior, positive or otherwise, can be intentional or unintentional, although both forms of work behavior can still have a noted influence on a work environment. In short, work behavior is behavior in the workplace which can influence the workplace and positive work behavior is behavior which goes toward the goals of a business or organization. Counterproductive work behavior, on the other hand, is a type of work behavior which does not go toward the goals of an organization and can in fact hinder work productivity, cause a negative work environment, and negatively affect an individual employee, a group of employees, or even an entire company. Counterproductive work behaviors, like positive work behaviors, are not always intentional. However, unintentional counterproductive work behaviors can still impact a company, especially if they are relatively more severe or negative. A brief but intense example of a counterproductive work behavior would be an employee who steals items from the company. This behavior goes against the goals of the organization, which is not only to be productive but to have productive employees, not employees who perform behavior that causes the company money and potentially creates a negative or even dangerous work environment.

There are many underlying factors and causes which can cause counterproductive work behavior. Sometimes, counterproductive work behavior is caused by problems within the company in combination with individual personality traits of an individual who is exhibiting counterproductive work behavior. The above example-an employee who steals from the company-could be explained by their work environment as well as personal characteristics. For example, the work environment could have the problem of inefficient supervision, which leads to easier stealing, and the individual employee could exhibit problems in their overall personality and psychology which leads them to steal. The combination of these two factors leads to counterproductive work behavior.

Common types of counterproductive work behavior and how businesses can manage them
Counterproductive work behavior is generally defined as behavior which goes against the goals of an organization. This is a broad definition which is meant to cover a wide range of different counterproductive work behaviors, including workplace withdrawal and anti-social behavior. Anti-social behavior includes behavior like bullying and sexual harassment and, next to withdrawal, is the most common form of counterproductive work behavior. Anti-social behavior in the workplace can be managed by allowing employees to make reasonable complaints if they are feeling harassed or bullied and following through on warnings and punishments for employees who exhibit anti-social behavior.

The most common form of counterproductive work behavior is withdrawal. Workplace withdrawal occurs when an employee is not performing their work duties due to withdrawal. It should be noted that counterproductive withdrawal is unexcused withdrawal, rather than excused withdrawal or withdrawal due to legitimate illness, emergencies, or vacation time. Withdrawal in the workplace comes in major and very common forms: lateness and absence.

When an employee is late for work, late for returning after excused breaks such as lunch breaks, or leaves work early without permission, they are considered to be exhibiting the counterproductive behavior of lateness. A late employee reduces the productivity of a company because they are not performing their work duties during their scheduled work time. A habitually late employee can reduce the overall productivity in the work environment by causing fellow employees to feel irritation at a tardy employee or causing fellow employees to emulate their example and also exhibit lateness. Businesses can counteract and manage the behavior of lateness by ensuring that proper warnings and punishments are in place for lateness. For example, a business may use the "three strikes and you're out" rule, which gives an employee three warnings for unexcused lateness before they are reprimanded or fired from their position.

When an employee is absent from work, they are considered to be exhibiting the counterproductive behavior of absence. An absent employee reduces productivity in a business by not being present for work. They can also further reduce productivity if they are required for group work behavior, such as meetings. It should be noted that absence is only considered counterproductive work behavior when it is unexcused or unreported. The most common factor which causes absence in the workplace is job dissatisfaction. Employees who are unhappy with their work duties, the work environment or the overall position they are working in are more likely to exhibit absence. Sometimes, absence is caused by other counterproductive work behaviors. For example, an individual may skip work because they are experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace. In this example, the counterproductive behavior of another employee-sexual harassment-can lead to a chain reaction of counterproductive behavior from other employees in the business.

Businesses can counteract this behavior in several ways, depending on what is actually causing the employee absence. If the absence is caused by a hostile work environment, business should ensure that the workplace is free from anti-social work behavior such as bullying or harassment. If the absence is caused by job dissatisfaction, a business should let employees know that they can talk to other individuals in the company-such as a company therapist-about what they are feeling in the hopes of solving the problem rather than simply firing the employee or having them quit. In the case of absence caused by laziness or an inexcusable reason, businesses can put a series of warnings and punishments into place to reduce absences. In general, a business should allow for employees to have excused absences for the following reasons: illness, family emergencies such as death or injury, as well as a reasonable amount of absences due to non-work related obligations such as taking care of children or other personal issues.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Work behavior in an organizational or business setting is behavior exhibited by employees or other individuals involved in a workforce who can have a noticeable influence on the productivity of an individual, a group of individuals, and a company.

# data[].attributes.body
This podcast details how to handle counterproductive employees. It goes through avoiding hiring them, managing their improvement, and deciding when to let them go.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Kellogg Insight: Don't worry, Shawna's not talking about someone here at Kellogg. But unfortunately, this kind of toxic behavior can be all too familiar.

Toxic workers are those people who make going into the office downright painful. In the most extreme cases, they lie, or steal, or exhibit other kinds of illegal or unethical behavior. They could be a bully, or incompetent, or just plain clueless about how to get along in an office.

In this month's podcast, we talk with Kellogg School professors about the surprisingly high cost of toxic workers, as well as how to avoid being saddled with these problem employees in your organization. So stay tuned.
[Music interlude]
Emily STONE: Hello, and welcome to Insight in Person, Kellogg Insight's monthly podcast, produced by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. I'm your host, Emily Stone.

Dylan MINOR: The big focus in the past has been on finding the star performer, retaining the star performer, incentivizing them, et cetera. People really haven't been paying attention to realize to what extent the negative superstar, if you will, can have on the firm.

STONE: That's Dylan Minor, an assistant professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at the Kellogg School, explaining his interest in studying toxic workers.

Let's start by having Minor define what a toxic worker is in the context of his research.

MINOR: Those workers that damage or harm the company's/organization's workers or property. Examples of that would be those workers that steal or commit fraud. The extreme version would be burn the office down in some movies with that example.

On the personnel side, either engaging in the kinds of behaviors that are clearly bad for the firm's organization such as sexual harassment, workplace violence, intimidation, all those kinds of things.

STONE: Minor's research is based on a rich data set with information about nearly 60,000 workers. The data came from a consulting firm that large, brand-name corporations use to screen potential hires.

The data include information on how candidates assessed their own skills, how well they actually performed those skills, and how well they performed at their jobs if they ended up being hired. And it showed that about 5 percent of workers were fired for engaging in toxic behavior.

MINOR: What they've been look at so far, the consulting company, is they've been only looking at positive productivity outcomes. They hadn't looked at any negative outcomes. In collaborating with the head data scientist there, we became very interested in the idea of trying to look at, "Okay, can we actually predict, or identify, or maybe at least probabilistically screen out some of these workers that are also creating bad outcomes?"

STONE: In crunching the data, Minor found several interesting predictors of which people were most likely to become toxic.

For example, the pre-employment test asked candidates to rate their skills on tasks like how well they can search the Internet or how many words they can type per minute. The candidates were then tested on those skills.

MINOR: And there's a whole distribution-some are actually better than they say they are, and of course, some are not as good as they say they are. That group is what I call overconfident. They're much more likely to engage in these toxic kinds of behaviors.

STONE: The candidate questionnaire also asked, as Minor puts it, how "other-regarding" the job candidates were. And, not surprisingly, the more they said they think about others, the less likely they were to become toxic.

However, another finding was less intuitive. One question asked candidates if they believe rules should always be followed or if sometimes you need to break the rules to get a job done.

It turns out, empirically, that it's actually those people that say, "You should always follow the rules" that are much more likely to break them and be terminated for these toxic behaviors.

MINOR: I think it's basically just a very clever test of honesty. Most people, I think, if they were completely honest would agree that, yeah, sometimes, the rules do need to be broken.

STONE: So those are some signs managers can look for to avoid hiring a toxic worker. But what are the consequences of a toxic worker if they slip by your filters and manage to get hired?

One finding gets at one of the biggest challenges of these toxic workers: they often appear to be good at their jobs.

MINOR: I find, in general, that these toxic workers are actually more productive than the average worker, which could explain why they might stick around longer than they should. However, what's interesting, in my view, is once you quality-adjust what they're doing, they actually produce below-quality work. In the long run then there's not as much of a trade-off as you might think.

STONE: Meaning they could be harming your relationship with clients or the strength of your brand. And, it turns out, they can also turn the people around them toxic.

MINOR: Another finding I have is that if you look at what I call "toxic density"-that would be the fraction of workers that over this period of time you're exposed to that are considered toxic-as that increases, there's about a 47% increased likelihood that that worker with that increased exposure to toxicity will themselves become toxic.

STONE: Minor also wanted to calculate the cold, hard cash these workers cost companies.

To do this, he looked at the increased turnover of the people who work around toxic employees-because, really, who wants to be stuck interacting with them every day?

MINOR: Fortunately the companies I got the data from keep pretty good records of how much it costs when there's turnover to get another person, hire them, et cetera. That induces a cost of roughly about $13,000 per annum for a toxic worker.

STONE: Next, he looked at the savings that a star performer-a worker in the top one percent-generates by doing more work than the typical employee can do. Minor calculated that a superstar saves a company $5,000 a year by being super productive.

From there, the math is simple.

MINOR: If we were able to actually replace the average worker with the superstar, we'd be saving about $5,000. If we could replace a toxic worker with an average worker, we'd save about 13,000.

STONE: Got that? He shows that the cost to a company of a toxic worker is more than twice as much as the benefit of a superstar.

MINOR: That was one of my most surprising findings so far. Again, so much of the work and practice in academia have been on the superstars, but realizing the magnitude-being able to actually start putting a cost on these toxic workers and compare that to the benefit of the superstar-was very illuminating.
[Music interlude]
STONE: If toxic workers are costing companies thousands of dollars apiece and infecting those around them with toxic behavior, then managers should be doing all they can to either a) not hire them, b) figure out how to effectively manage them, or c) just send them on their way.

So, what does this look like in practice?

Brenda Ellington BOOTH: My big philosophy is hire slow, fire fast.

STONE: That's Brenda Ellington Booth. She's a clinical professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School. She's also an executive coach, often helping companies deal with toxic employees.

Booth defines toxic workers more broadly than Minor does in his research. For Booth-and probably for many of us-a toxic worker could be a bully, or someone insecure or incompetent. Basically, someone you just really don't want to be around.

BOOTH: I think the most serious toxic worker is one that has any kind of power or authority, so a manager. The toxic manager, my favorite phrase is, they tend to kiss up and crap down. The last category I thought of was "the totally clueless." The, "#8220;I didn't know you can't say that to a woman. My dad said it, or my sister takes it."

STONE: Obviously the best defense with these sorts of workers is a good offense: simply don't let them through the door to begin with. Hire slow, as Booth says.

BOOTH: I think the first thing is to definitely check references. Ask for references that they don't give you. Who was your previous employer? Do you mind if I called your own boss? Versus just giving, "Hey, here's three people you can call."

STONE: And don't just focus on the candidate's skills. Think about the person more broadly.

BOOTH: Of course, you want the superstar. But also, do they fit the culture? Or do they have the values that you want to instill in the workforce? A lot of times, going after just the performers, people forget that.

STONE: And don't feel like you need to hire immediately when you find a candidate you like.

BOOTH: I always tell people if they have the luxury, hire them on as a consultant initially, and see how they get along. Yes, they'll be on their best behavior, but usually you'll see some telltale signs.

STONE: But, let's say your eagle-eyed hiring process fails every now and then and you end up with a toxic worker on your team. Can they be de-toxified?

BOOTH: It depends on what the root cause is of the bad behavior. Sometimes it's personality, which is hard to change. Sometimes, they just don't know any better. Sometimes, they have come up in an environment where that was okay. And in that case, that can be fixed, because it's just like, "Well, I didn't know. I just assumed that everyone was like this." Or, "At my old company, this was okay. But what I'm hearing now, it's not."

STONE: If they can't be reformed, and firing them isn't practical-because there are many organizations where that's no easy task-Booth says manage them so as to minimize their impact on coworkers.

BOOTH: In that case, I say, isolate. At least put them in a place where they can do a minimum amount of harm. Put them on special projects. Hopefully, they'll get the message. Sometimes people never do. But at least don't have them as a central hub of the organization where there's a lot of direct reports, or they have to interact with a lot of people in the organization. Because then, one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch.

STONE: Even if you succeed in isolating a toxic worker, there's still a risk to the company if you keep them around.

BOOTH: What a manager does by allowing that person to stay is implicitly saying that behavior is okay. If a leader is letting someone bully them, in a sense, or allows them to be disrespectful to team members, or even to the leader, it shows weakness. Because everyone knows who that person is. If a leader doesn't stand up, that leader loses credibility.

STONE: Which brings us to the question of firing that toxic worker. No manager relishes the idea, but sometimes it's the only good move for your organization. And even though toxic workers are so toxic, it doesn't make them any easier to fire.

BOOTH: These people are hard to deal with. They'll give you lots of reasons why not to do it. It's usually not the poorest performer that's toxic. That's easy. If someone has poor performance, you can document it and say, "You know what? This is not working out, your numbers don't look good," or, "It's clear that the client doesn't like you." That's easy. The hardest one is when someone is good to great, and really toxic in terms of their behavior and attitude.

STONE: So Booth encourages her clients to focus on the big picture and what they know is best for the organization in the long run. Here is an example:

BOOTH: I got a call recently of a CEO of an organization, that said, "I need you to coach my CFO." And I said, "Hm." There is a whole class of coaching called remediation coaching. Basically, the person needs "fixing."

I called the CEO on it, and it's like, "Does this person, in your heart of hearts, do you feel like they belong in the organization?" Well, no, we did all these 360s, and he got all these poor reviews from all over the organization, and we just wanted a coach to really validate our decision. It's like, "Why do you need me to validate? You already know what to do."
[Music interlude]
STONE: This program was produced by Jessica Love, Kate Proto, Fred Schmalz, Emily Stone, and Michael Spikes.

Special thanks to Kellogg professors Dylan Minor and Brenda Booth, as well as to Shawna Mehta for sharing her story.

You can stream or download our monthly podcast from iTunes, or from our website, where you can read more about employee relations, toxic workers, bad bosses, and effective leadership. Visit us at insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu. We'll be back next month with another Insight In Person podcast.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Podcast: How to Rid Your Company of Toxic Employees

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kellogg Insight: Don't worry, Shawna's not talking about someone here at Kellogg. But unfortunately, this kind of toxic behavior can be all too familiar. Toxic workers are those people who make going into the office downright painful. In the most extreme cases, they lie, or steal, or exhibit other kinds of illegal or unethical behavior.