Factors Affecting Self-other Agreement about Employees' Counterproductive Work Behavior: An Item-level Focus
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to extend the literature on measurement of counterproductive work behavior (CWB), particularly the relationship between ratings of CWB from self- and other-rating (i.e., supervisors and coworkers) sources. Previous research suggests that self-ratings and other-ratings of CWB are usually viable alternatives to each other, but that they do contain sizable unique information. However, it remains unclear exactly what this unique information is and whether it is valid unique information. Therefore, there is a need to determine what are the differences and similarities in information contained in self- and other-ratings of CWB. The goal of the present study is to address this by examining the factors that affect relationships and mean differences between self-ratings and other-ratings of CWB at the item-level. The present study proposes 10 dimensions (e.g., observability, memorability, task relevance) along which CWB items can be categorized and that may affect self-other agreement. In the first study, subject matter experts rated each CWB item in the Bennett and Robinson CWB scale on the 10 dimensions. In the second study, 85 paired self-ratings and other-ratings of employees’ CWB were collected. Results demonstrated that (a) self-other CWB correlations were stronger for CWB items rated by SMEs in Study 1a as more observable and less task relevant; (b) self-other CWB mean differences were smaller for CWB items rated by SMEs as more observable, public, memorable, unambiguous, and less task relevant; and (c) other-raters’ overall ratings of CWB were more strongly influenced by CWB items rated by SMEs as more observable and public than were self-raters’ ratings of overall CWB. In all, self-other agreement on CWB items is stronger for items that are more observable, public, memorable, unambiguous, and less task relevant; for the most part these sorts of items are interpersonal-target CWBs (CWB-Is) rather than organizational-target CWBs (CWB-Os). These results suggest that self-other disagreement about CWB is in part due to other-raters having inadequate opportunity to observe certain CWBs (i.e., less observable and private CWBs) and having difficulty interpreting whether certain behaviors are CWBs (i.e., ambiguous, less memorable, task relevant behaviors); particularly CWB-Os. This means other-ratings of CWB-O should be viewed with skepticism and should always be supplemented with ratings from other sources, such as self-ratings.
Subject
counterproductive work behaviordimensions
self-other agreement
self-ratings
other-ratings
self-other correlation
measurement
Citation
Batarse, Juan Carlos (2015). Factors Affecting Self-other Agreement about Employees' Counterproductive Work Behavior: An Item-level Focus. Master's thesis, Texas A & M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /155112.