Counterproductive Work Behaviour

What it is

Organisational psychology separates what people are paid to do from what else they do at work. Job performance is the first: how well the core duties are carried out. Counterproductive work behaviour is the second family of outcomes: voluntary conduct that damages the organisation or its members. It is a category defined by its effect on others, not by a single act, and studies usually collect it with ratings from the person, a supervisor or colleagues.

The category matters for personality research because a trait can relate to the two outcomes differently. The 2012 meta-analysis by O'Boyle, Forsyth, Banks and McDaniel, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, covered published research from 1951 to 2011 on Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy. It pooled 245 independent samples with 43,907 participants. All three traits were associated with more counterproductive work behaviour. Machiavellianism and psychopathy were also associated with lower job performance. The authors report that authority and culture moderated the links, so the strength of the association was not the same in every setting.

The framing in the paper's title, a social exchange perspective, is the explanatory idea the authors bring. Adrian Furnham's entry on the dark triad in The New Psychology offers per-trait accounts in the same spirit: that Machiavellians distrust that extra effort will be repaid, that narcissists feel the rules of reciprocity do not apply to them, and that the insensitivity in psychopathy makes helping others less likely. These are his reading of the pattern, not tested mechanisms.

In effect

In research: the dark triad meta-analysis

The 2012 meta-analysis is the main evidence behind the category in this publication. Its result is that the dark triad is more reliably tied to conduct than to pay or position. A single German sample of 793 early-career employees, studied by Daniel Spurk and colleagues, found narcissism related to higher salary and Machiavellianism to leadership position. Both findings stand together because they measure different outcomes.

In everyday life: the colleague who does the job

The following is an illustration and not a reported case. A colleague delivers every task on time and is a source of friction in the team. The performance review records the first fact and often misses the second. The two-outcome framing exists to make the second fact measurable.

In commerce: what an appraisal captures

A firm that appraises people on output alone will not see conduct that harms colleagues or the organisation until it shows up elsewhere. The meta-analysis does not estimate costs to firms, and this page makes no claim about them. It supplies a vocabulary: ask whether the measure used to judge a person includes conduct, and who supplied the rating.

What it does not say

It does not say that people with high dark triad scores will behave badly at work. The result is an association across many samples, with authority and culture changing its strength.

It does not say that the traits are diagnoses. The dark triad is a subclinical grouping measured mostly by self-report, and nothing on this page classifies any person.

It does not give a figure for how much conduct the traits explain that this page can report, because the sources read for this publication were an abstract and publisher-side summaries. The abstract as read states the direction of the links, not their sizes.

It does not settle causation. A person under a manager they distrust may behave worse, and a trait score cannot separate that from the trait.

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