The Big-5 Personality and Counterproductive Behaviours

Employees can engage in a wide spectrum of misbehaviour in organizations. Such counterproductivity costs employers billions of dollars annually worldwide (Ones, 2002). The extent of actual, psychological and societal costs to organizations can be better understood when one considers the multitude of different ways employees can misbehave. Geddes and Baron (1997) found that 69 per cent of managers reported having experienced verbal aggression. Wimbush and Dalton (1997) used multiple methods and samples to estimate the base rate for employee theft, and found ‘Depending on the level one ascribes to nontrivial employee theft, .. . [the different techniques of estimating employee theft] . . . converge on theft rates over 50 per cent’ (p. 756). It is estimated that substance abuse costs the United States alone more than $135 billion each year (DeCresce et al., 1990). Harwood, Fountain and Livermore (1992) estimated that in the United States economy $82 billion in lost potential productivity could be attributed to alcohol and drug abuse in 1992 ($67.7 billion and $14.2 billion, respectively).