Explaining workplace delinquency: The role of Honesty–Humility, ethical culture, and employee surveillance

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Highlights

  • Personality and organization were hypothesized to affect workplace delinquency.

  • Honesty–Humility was the main personality predictor of workplace delinquency.

  • Ethical culture and employee surveillance were related to workplace delinquency.

  • No interactions between the three predictors were observed.

Abstract

In this research the effects of personality and organizational characteristics on workplace delinquency were investigated. In a sample of 455 respondents from a wide variety of organizations, two personality traits, HEXACO Honesty–Humility and Conscientiousness, and two organizational characteristics, ethical culture and employee surveillance, explained a significant amount of variance in workplace delinquency. No interaction effects between personality and organizational practices in the explanation of workplace delinquency were found. Results are discussed in light of the role of personality and Routine Activity Theory in predicting unethical behaviors, delinquency, and/or occupational crime in organizations.

Section snippets

HEXACO Honesty–Humility

The HEXACO model of personality posits that personality is most optimally described using six dimensions that together form the HEXACO acronym, that is, Honesty–Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to experience (Lee & Ashton, 2004). Like its predecessor, the Big Five model of personality (Goldberg, 1990), the HEXACO model is grounded in a cross-cultural lexical approach, and although there is still debate on the ‘optimal’ structure of

Ethical culture and employee surveillance

Ethical culture and employee surveillance can be considered two different organizational solutions to employee norm violations. Ethical culture, defined by Kaptein (2009, p. 262) as “the informal control system of an organization [which] encompasses the experiences, assumptions, and expectations of managers and employees about how the organization prevents them from behaving unethically and encourages them to behave ethically” can be considered a ‘soft control’ system. That is, ethical culture

Personality–organization interactions

To our knowledge, no research has so far addressed possible interactions between personality on the one hand and ethical culture or employee surveillance on the other, although research has investigated the interaction between Honesty–Humility and perceptions of organizational politics (Wiltshire et al., 2014, Zettler and Hilbig, 2010) and the interactions between personality and situational strength (Meyer et al., 2014) in the prediction of counterproductive work behavior. Both Zettler and

Sample and procedure

Data were collected in three waves, each two weeks apart. In total 1672 members of a large-scale ISO certified research panel, who worked in a wide variety of organizations, were approached to fill out a number of questionnaires, of whom 913 (54.6%) responded in the first wave. The second wave contained 736 participants, and the third wave 590 participants. Of these 590 participants, we retained 455 participants (27.2%) who had worked in their company for three years or more (for explanation,

Results

An overview of the correlations and descriptives of the variables is provided in Table 1. Table 2 displays the results of the regression analysis. Because educational level, religiosity, organizational tenure, and hierarchical level were virtually unrelated to workplace delinquency, we only entered gender and age in the first step of the regression analysis plus five of the six HEXACO scales. Especially Conscientiousness, and to a lesser extent Agreeableness and gender explained variance in

Conclusions and discussion

The outcomes of this research show that workplace delinquency is mainly predicted by the personality variables Honesty–Humility and Conscientiousness and by the organizational variables ethical culture and employee surveillance. Together, these four variables explained 15.8% (74.4% of 21.2%) of the variance in workplace delinquency. The findings on personality are in line with earlier research showing the importance of Honesty–Humility and Conscientiousness in the prediction of

Funding

The research reported in this article was funded by a grant of Hoffmann BV.

Conflict of interest statement

The Dutch version of the HEXACO-PI-R has been released for commercial purposes. A percentage of the profit from sales will be used by the University to support the research of the first author.

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