Personality traits and counterproductive work behaviors: the moderating role of demographic characteristics

Abstract

The main objective of the current contribution is to determine how the personality traits (Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness and Openness to experience) influence counterproductive work behaviors (CWB), and whether/to what extent this potential impact is moderated by employees’ main demographic characteristics. To reach the pointed aim a survey among 1,380 professionally active people in Poland was conducted. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) methodology was applied to analyze the obtained empirical data. The proposed theoretical models were intended to determine how particular types of personality affect organizational and interpersonal CWB and how those types of personality affect CWB (Production deviance, Abuse against others, Theft, Sabotage, Withdrawal) with potential moderating effects of demographic features. We confirmed that personality traits have an inverse relationship with counterproductive behavior. The strongest predicators of interpersonal and organizational CWB were: Conscientiousness (the correlation in both cases is negative), Agreeableness (only in the case of CWB-I – negative correlation), Neuroticism (CWB-O – negative correlation) and Extraversion (CWB-I – positive influence; CWB-O - negative influence). With regard to the subjective CWB categories, Agreeableness reduced Abuse against others the most, Openness to experience increased Withdrawal, and Extraversion – Abuse against others, while Neuroticism and Conscientiousness reduced Withdrawal the most. The pointed relationships were significantly moderated by the analyzed demographic variables, with most significant moderating effects recorded in the case of women, the elderly and people with longer work experience, as well as in office / clerical positions (compared to those holding managerial positions).

Relationships between leadership style and organizational commitment: The moderating role of the system of work

“…Engaged employees are emotionally committed, loyal, and productive, which results in better customer service. The opposite are disengaged employees, whose work negatively affects the organization's performance; they have higher absenteeism rates, lower participation, weaker customer service, and a generally negative attitude toward work and colleagues (Canavesi & Minelli, 2022;Szostek et al, 2023;2022a;2022b). The behavior of the team leader is not insignificant to employee engagement.…”

“…An example can be matching a leader and a subordinate in terms of, for example, their demonstrated conscientiousness which results in higher job satisfaction and thus lowers the willingness to leave a job (Guay et al, 2020). The same conscientiousness among employees makes them less likely to exhibit counterproductive behavior that could negatively affect the performance of the organization as a whole (Szostek et al, 2022a;2022b).…”

“…Proper matching of the leader's behavior with the employees' profile can result in the elimination of counterproductive work behavior, and thus better performance of the entire organization. This, of course, needs to be explored and analyzed in depth in future work (Szostek et al, 2022b).…”

The impact of work engagement of different generations on organisational engagement

“…(Harter et al, 2020;Nguyen et al, 2021). Moreover, employee engagement is associated with positive behaviours at work (Giancaspro et al, 2022;Szostek, 2022;Szostek et al, 2022), greater job satisfaction (Rayton and Yalabik, 2014;Grubert et al, 2022), work efficiency (Basit, 2019;Turner, 2020;Borisov & Vinogradov, 2022), enhanced individual and teamwork innovativeness (Afsar, 2021;Seppälä et al, 2018), individual employee creativity (Demerouti et al, 2015), increased well-being (Saks et al, 2022), benefits of employee training and development (Azeem et al, 2013), discovered talents, and career advancement (Onday, 2016;Pandita and Ray, 2018;Rózsa et al, 2023).…”

Job crafting and sustainable work performance: A systematic literature review

“…In addition, company managers expect employees to shape and manage their work themselves in order to continuously increase their performance (Çera et al, 2019;Demerouti et al, 2020;Rózsa et al, 2022). The given assumption, however, requires an excessive level of employee involvement (Szostek et al, 2020(Szostek et al, , 2022a(Szostek et al, , 2022b, while one of the ways to achieve it is offered by job crafting, i.e. the adjustment or adaptation of work procedures by the employees themselves with the aim of increasing its perceived importance and ability to identify with work and, consequently, increased work performance (Irfan et al, 2023;Mondo et al, 2023;Shin et al, 2020).…”