Individual and Situational Antecedents of Counterproductive Work Behaviors

Counterproductive work behaviors (CWB) are harmful to organizations and detrimental to individual and collective performance. Although CWB have been considerably explored in the last decades, few studies have tried to assess the relative influence of their predictors. In this paper, we develop and test a structural equations model to evaluate the combined effects of two personality traits (agreeableness and neuroticism) and two situational variables (perceived organizational justice and leader-member exchange quality) on CWB. The analysis of data collected from 527 employees of a large Brazilian organization shows that agreeableness, neuroticism, and leader-member exchange quality (LMX) have direct effects on CWB and that LMX fully mediates the influence of organizational justice on the latter. Our findings extend previous models that looked into the Justice-LMX-CWB relationships and highlight the critical role played by leaders in preventing deleterious behaviors. We discuss their implications for research, as well as for human resource management (HRM) practice.