| Counterproductive behavior in employees is a pervasive and expensive problem Both "property deviance" (primarily employee theft) and "production deviance" (losses in time, quality, or production) cost business unnecessary billions of dollars annually. Both from an historical perspective of the criminalization of one-time citizen rights and from the unwillingness of modern organizations to confront the problem, it is understandable that employees take some of their wages "in kind."; Use of progressive management practices and screening employees for honesty with existing methods such as the polygraph and written honesty tests have been only partially successful in controlling counterproductive behavior. In the absence of a cohesive theoretical network explaining employee deviance, an interactive model of individual personality characteristics and organizational variables is proposed and put into operation.; In a large predictive study, the PDI Employment Inventory was developed as a new preemployment instrument to assess the probability of productive versus counterproductive job performance. Seventeen additional validity studies with the Inventory also have been completed.; Results showed that the Employment Inventory consistently has predicted various forms of counterproductivity in over 43,000 employees across several occupations, producing correlations in the.20s,.30s, and.40s. At the organizational level, correlations of the Inventory with measurements of company outcomes of counterproductive behavior (e.g., inventory shrinkage and involuntary termination rate) have been in the.50s.; A survey of 5,000 employees in 80 locations showed that dissatisfaction with management (an approximate measure of management quality) was much less related to the same organizational outcomes. Therefore, the productivity/counterproductivity of individual employees has a greater impact on organizational costs than does the leadership shown by company management.; To develop a stable work force with dependable work habits, it is important to find the right people for the job. For hourly positions, the identification of applicants' concerns for rules and authority, work motivation, responsibility, and control of impulses and hostility can help provide more productive employees. By measuring these characteristics, the Employment Inventory can provide an important economic benefit for an organization. |
