Organizational Factors and Workplace Deviance: Influences of Abusive Supervision, Dysfunctional Employees, and Toxic Work Environments

s big corporate misconduct scandals continue to dominate newspaper headlines, it has never been more important to understand corporate deviance. The present chapter explains the reasons why organizations break rules and employees engage in deviant behavior. This chapter reviews existing literature on workplace deviance and examines the role of different organizational factors that stimulate and sustain it: abusive supervision, dysfunctional employees, and toxic work environments. It finds that the characteristics of leaders and how they treat employees, as well as the characteristics of employees and how they respond to the organization, are determinants of organizational deviancy. It also finds that there is more at play than individual leaders and employees or the interaction between them. The organizational culture or climate as a whole can become negative and come to sustain and stimulate deviancy. However, there is not yet a clear, validated understanding of what is a negative culture or climate and the individual elements that spur deviance. In all of this, the organizational psychology of deviant organizations does not yet clearly show exactly how deviance relates to legal compliance.