Topic: The Ambient Social and Physical Environment and Deviant Behaviors at Work
Date & Time: 13:30-15:00pm, June 11th, 2018
Venue: Room 306, Tongji Building A
Language: English
Speaker:
John M. Schaubroeck , Ph.D.
John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Management
Eli Broad College of Business
Michigan State University
ABSTRACT
Deviant work behaviors (also known as counterproductive work behaviors) concern employees’ transgressing organizational and/or societal norms through their acts or omissions. Research over many years has highlighted the role of the social environment (e.g., leader behaviors; peer behaviors) in precipitating deviant behavior, while more recently a small number of studies have implicated the ambient physical environment (e.g., darkness, filth, pollution). I will summarize recent studies that investigated the process through which the social or the physical environment separately promotes deviant behaviors. In terms of social antecedents, our prior research on leader behavior has emphasized how leaders can both encourage (through mistreatment of followers) and discourage (through modeling and teaching ethical behavior) deviant behavior. While both peers’ and leaders’ behaviors inform social learning of normative and counter-normative behavior, our more recent research found that peers’ deviant behaviors have a weaker influence on the behavior of individual employees when the leader models and promotes ethical behavior. Regarding the physical environment, we conducted studies examining the effects of daily pollution levels on employees’ deviant behaviors at work. These studies suggest that pollution influences behavior through an appraisal process precipitated by communications concerning health threat levels rather than by the direct physiological effects of the pollution itself. These two sets of studies highlight the distinct motivational pathways through which individuals’ ambient environments influence deviant behavior and point to different approaches leaders can take to limit deviant behavior.
All the faculties and graduate students are welcome to attend this lecture!
