Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 2010, Vol. 15, No.

2, 154 166

2010 American Psychological Association 1076-8998/10/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0018349

Can Counterproductive Work Behaviors Be Productive? CWB as Emotion-Focused Coping

Mindy M. Krischer and Lisa M. Penney
University of Houston

Emily M. Hunter
Baylor University

The goal of our study was to determine whether some forms of counterproductive work behavior (CWB) may serve to benet employees. Building on the stressorstrain framework and theories of coping, we investigated whether two forms of CWB, production deviance and withdrawal, serve as a means of coping to mitigate the impact of low distributive and procedural justice on emotional exhaustion. Results from a survey of 295 employed persons from around the United States suggest that production deviance and withdrawal may benet employees by reducing emotional exhaustion in the face of low distributive justice but not necessarily low procedural justice. Keywords: counterproductive work behavior, coping, burnout, justice

Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) refers to willful behaviors by employees that have the potential to harm an organization, its members, or both (Spector & Fox, 2005). The most well-known typology of CWB classies behaviors according to whether they target another person or the organization (Robinson & Bennett, 1995), although others have made ner distinctions. For example, Spector et al. (2006) proposed ve categories of CWB: abuse against others (e.g., ignoring or arguing with others), sabotage (e.g., physically damaging organizational property), theft, production deviance (e.g., intentionally working slowly, doing work incorrectly, or neglecting to follow procedures), and withdrawal (e.g., taking longer breaks than allowed, arriving late, leaving early). CWB is estimated to cost organizations billions of dollars each year (Bennett & Robinson, 2000) and is, therefore, of considerable concern to organizations. Accordingly, researchers have offered a number of theories to better understand and ultimately control

Mindy M. Krischer and Lisa M. Penney, Department of Psychology, University of Houston; Emily M. Hunter, Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, Hankamer School of Business, Baylor University. Portions of this article were presented at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, Chicago, IL, August 2009. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Mindy M. Krischer, Department of Psychology, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77024. E-mail: mmkrischer@uh.edu

these costly behaviors. Most theories of CWB, including the stressor emotion model (Spector & Fox, 2005) and causal reasoning theory (Martinko, Gundlach, & Douglas, 2002), describe an affective event process wherein an individuals subjective appraisal of a workplace event results in a negative emotional experience that in turn motivates an act of CWB. Thus, these theories describe employee CWB as a reaction to aversive environmental and emotional experiences. Neuman and Baron (2005) present CWB in a general aggression framework and argue that employees perform acts of CWB either as a reaction to a provocative event (i.e., hostile) or to obtain some desired end (i.e., instrumental). Hostile motives are consistent with affect-driven theories; however, few studies have examined potential instrumental motives of CWB (notable exceptions include Bies, Tripp, & Kramer, 1997; Folger & Skarlicki, 2005). Diefendorff and Mehta (2007) argued that the neglect of individual motivation represents a serious gap in CWB research. Whereas destructive at the organizational level, individuals may experience some benet as a result of performing CWB that encourages these behaviors. According to Penney and Spector (2007), theories of emotion regulation and coping provide an alternative perspective on the instrumental use of CWB by suggesting that some employee CWB may be performed as an attempt to cope with stressful situations at work and reduce the experience of negative emotions. Coping refers to the cognitive and behavioral steps taken by individuals in response to perceived demands or stressors (Lazarus

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& Folkman, 1984). Stressors typically result in employee strain (e.g., emotional exhaustion, Ito & Brotheridge, 2003), and successful coping buffers the negative impact of stressors and reduces strain. Although CWB has not been studied in relation to coping, some coping behaviors could be considered counterproductive from an organizations perspective. For example, employee withdrawal (e.g., taking longer breaks than allowed) may reect attempts by employees to limit their exposure to stressful situations and prevent subsequent strain. Production deviance (e.g., intentionally working slowly) may serve as a strategy to gain control over stressors and the accompanying negative emotional reactions. In spite of the similarities between some CWB and coping, no studies to date have examined whether employees use CWB as a coping mechanism to prevent strain outcomes. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to examine CWB within a coping framework to determine whether certain types of CWB mitigate the impact of job stressors on a common psychological strain: emotional exhaustion.

Emotional Exhaustion and the StressorStrain Framework

Emotional exhaustion is one of the most widely studied correlates of job stressors (R. T. Lee & Ashforth, 1996; Maslach & Jackson, 1984) and is considered an important psychological strain (Maslach & Leiter, 2008; Halbesleben & Buckley, 2004). Emotional exhaustion refers to feelings of being overextended and generally worn down and is a key component of burnout (Maslach & Jackson, 1984). From a conservation of resources perspective (Hobfoll, 1989), emotional exhaustion represents a depletion of emotional resources and has been associated with turnover (Wright & Cropanzano, 1998), cardiovascular and sleep problems (Saleh & Shapiro, 2008), decreased motivation, and decreased task performance and citizenship behaviors (Halbesleben & Bowler, 2007). Emotional exhaustion is also an antecedent to other dimensions of burnout, such as depersonalization of others and reduced personal accomplishment (Maslach, 1982). The stressorstrain framework is widely used to explain how negative events lead to individual responses, including emotional exhaustion, CWB, and coping (e.g., Fox, Spector, & Miles, 2001; Grant & Langan-Fox, 2006; Ito & Brotheridge, 2003). A key assumption of this framework is that individuals ap-

praise events in their environment as threatening or nonthreatening, especially with regard to cognitive, emotional, or physical resources (Lazarus, 1991). In the workplace, threatening events are referred to as job stressors and include organizational constraints, interpersonal conict, role conict, role ambiguity, and perceptions of injustice (see Fox et al., 2001, for a review). Job stressors can lead to strains, which are dened as negative outcomes that result from stress (Spector, 1998). Strains can be physical, psychological, or behavioral (Jex & Beehr, 1991). Physical strains include health outcomes, such as tension headaches and sleep disruption. Psychological strains include negative emotional reactions, such as anger, anxiety, frustration, and over time, emotional exhaustion and burnout. Consistent with the stressorstrain framework, a number of job stressors have been associated with emotional exhaustion including work overload (Maslach & Goldberg, 1998), role conict (R. T. Lee & Ashforth, 1996), and perceived inequity (Taris, Peeters, Le Blanc, Schreurs, & Schaufeli, 2001). Behavioral strains reect actions that an individual performs as a result of experiencing stressors and often include attempts at coping. According to Folkman, Lazarus, Dunkel-Schetter, Delongis, and Gruen (1986), coping involves efforts to conserve emotional, cognitive, or physical resources either by addressing the stressor or the concomitant negative emotion. Although many classications of coping have been proposed, the most widely used distinction is between problem-focused and emotion-focused coping (Skinner, Edge, Altman, & Sherwood, 2003). Folkman and Lazarus (1980) dene problem-focused coping as efforts taken to directly address the source of the problem to reduce or eliminate the stressor. Examples of problem-focused coping include generating options to address the problem, evaluating each option, and engaging in steps to solve the problem (Baker & Berenbaum, 2007). In contrast, emotionfocused coping serves to reduce an individuals negative emotional response to a stressor, such as venting emotions, seeking out social support, positively reinterpreting events, trying to distract oneself by engaging in other activities, and increasing drug and alcohol use (Baker & Berenbaum, 2007; Latack & Havlovic, 1992). According to Lazarus (1996), the primary distinction between emotion-focused and problem-focused coping is the function of coping, not necessarily the specic behavior or cognition. Conceptualizations of coping also distinguish coping from coping effectiveness (Latack & Havlovic,

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1992). As coping reects attempts by an individual to manage stressors, coping is effective if it prevents, avoids, or controls individual distress (Latack & Havlovic, 1992, p. 483). Therefore, emotional exhaustion can be a key indicator of effective coping in the workplace (Ito & Brotheridge, 2003).

Coping and CWB

From an organizations perspective, employee coping behaviors can be productive or counterproductive (Spector, 1998). For example, an employee who responds to a heavy workload by developing a more efcient process for completing his or her work contributes to organizational productivity. However, an employee who responds to a heavy workload by deliberately skipping crucial steps in the work process that could jeopardize product quality to complete work faster or who takes longer breaks to avoid his or her workload detracts from organizational efciency and productivity. We are not the rst to acknowledge that CWB may reect employee coping. Spector and Fox (2002) suggested that CWB often results from an emotional response and aims either to actively attack the cause of the situation or to passively and indirectly cope with the emotion (p. 274). Similarly, Allen and Greenberger (1980) suggested that individuals might engage in destructive or vengeful acts, including CWB, to increase feelings of control over a stressful situation. In terms of the stressorstrain framework, we suggest that CWB can be performed as a manifestation of negative emotion associated with stressors, and it may also serve an instrumental coping function that mitigates the negative effect of perceived stressors on subsequent strain. That is, some forms of CWB may reect attempts at emotion-focused coping to prevent or reduce emotional exhaustion. According to Baker and Berenbaum (2007), problem-focused coping is more effective than emotionfocused coping. However, other researchers have suggested that the wide range of emotion-focused coping strategies and wide variety of stressful situations make any blanket statement of the effectiveness of emotion-focused coping suspect (Austenfeld & Stanton, 2004; Baker & Berenbaum, 2007). In particular, the literature on coping outcomes suggests that emotion-focused coping is effective in situations wherein one has little to no control over stressors (Folkman & Lazarus, 1985; Go ral, Kesimci, & Genc o z, 2006; Zakowski, Hall, Klein, & Baum, 2001). Indeed, Folkman and Lazarus (1980) noted that although stressors can elicit both types of coping, prob-

lem-focused coping tends to occur when people feel that they can effectively address the stressor, whereas emotion-focused coping tends to occur when people feel that the stressor is uncontrollable. In the stress literature, perceived control over a stressor is said to play an important role in diminishing the effects of stressors on subsequent strain (Karasek, 1979). For example, the negative effects of having to complete a large amount of work can be reduced by giving employees control over the specic tasks and pace of work (Spector, 1998). However, not all sources of perceived stress are subject to the control of employees. In particular, stressors are likely least subject to employee control when the source is a more powerful entity, such as the employing organization (Lind & van den Bos, 2002).

Organizational Justice
The lack of organizational justice is one of the most commonly researched workplace stressors and one of the strongest predictors of CWB (Berry, Ones, & Sackett, 2007). Organizational justice refers to the perceived fairness of the interactions between individuals and organizations. Two of the most widely studied forms of organizational justice are distributive and procedural justice. Distributive justice refers to the perceived fairness of reward allocation (i.e., the extent to which ones pay reects the work that one has completed), whereas procedural justice refers to the perceived fairness of the processes by which decisions are made (i.e., the extent to which decisions are based on accurate information, made without bias). Although other forms of justice are also discussed in the extant literature (e.g., interpersonal and informational; Colquitt, 2001), we focus on perceptions of distributive and procedural justice because these forms are often perceived as discretionary activities on the part of the organization as opposed to individual supervisors (Fasolo, 1995; Moorman, Blakely, & Niehoff, 1998; Shore & Shore, 1995) and therefore are more likely to be perceived by employees as outside the scope of their direct inuence. A growing body of research has linked low levels of justice with poor psychological and physiological outcomes (e.g., Vermunt & Steensma, 2005), including emotional exhaustion (Tepper, 2000) and absenteeism (De Boer, Bakker, Syroit, & Schaufeli, 2002). Therefore, in line with previous research evidence, we propose the following hypothesis:

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Hypothesis 1: Perceptions of distributive and procedural justice are negatively related to emotional exhaustion. We further suggest that when faced with low distributive or procedural justice, stressors over which one has little control, employees may engage in some forms of CWB as emotion-focused coping to reduce emotional exhaustion. We do not, however, expect all forms of CWB to be effective coping strategies in response to low justice. Because the source of perceived injustice is more powerful than the individual (i.e., the organization), we expect that CWB will be largely covert rather than overt (Aquino, Tripp, & Bies, 2001; Jermier, Knights, & Nord, 1994). According to Baron and Neuman (1996), others generally perceive overt behaviors, such as destroying property and yelling, as having a clear harmful intent. Overt behaviors may not be effective coping strategies for reducing emotional exhaustion because they come with the added stress of being identied and suffering consequences (e.g., verbal or written reprimand, termination) that could lead to additional strain. However, covert behaviors, such as purposely working slowly or taking longer breaks than allowed, may not be perceived by others as necessarily intending harm, and are therefore less likely to result in negative consequences. Two such covert forms of CWB are withdrawal and production deviance. Withdrawal behaviors can buffer the impact of low perceived justice and reduce emotional exhaustion by helping employees replenish emotional resources. When employees feel angry about a lack of distributive or procedural justice, leaving work early or taking longer breaks enables them to temporarily escape a situation that induces negative emotions (Spector et al., 2006; Westman & Etzion, 2001). While away, feelings of anger may dissipate and emotional homeostasis can be restored. Our argument is consistent with two emotion regulation processes described by Gross (1998), situation selection and response modulation. Situation selection refers to deliberately engaging or avoiding certain people, places, or situations to avoid things that might lead to unwanted emotion. Response modulation occurs after negative emotions have been aroused and consists of actions taken to reduce the physiological, experiential, or behavioral aspects of emotional response (Lord & Harvey, 2002, p. 136). For example, if employees experience anger or other negative emotions because of unfair treatment, then taking time away from work may reduce the experience or severity of those emotions and, by extension, their

emotional exhaustion. Working slowly, a form of production deviance, may also operate in the same manner. A recent meta-analysis provides support for the temporary benet of withdrawal in response to stressors in terms of physical symptoms of strain (Darr & Johns, 2008). Indeed, there is growing evidence that absences from the workplace of any duration can lead to positive outcomes such as decreased perceptions of job stressors and burnout (Etzion, Eden, & Lapidot, 1998), increased work engagement, proactive behavior, and performance, and self-reported well-being (Fritz & Sonnentag, 2005; Sonnentag, 2003). Furthermore, research on retaliation provides support for production deviance as emotion-focused coping performed in response to injustice. According to equity theory (Adams, 1963), when employees perceive their ratio of organizational outcomes (e.g., pay) to inputs (e.g., effort) to be smaller than the ratio of others, they may become resentful and restore equity by withholding inputs. Thus, production deviance may reect coping in the form of situation modication or efforts to directly modify the situation so as to alter its emotional impact (Gross, 1998, p. 283). Therefore, by allowing employees to feel that they are evening the score, production deviance, such as intentionally working slowly, doing work incorrectly, and deliberately ignoring procedures, may increase employees perceptions of control in the face of perceived injustice, thereby reducing emotional exhaustion. A number of studies have shown that coping efforts that restore an individuals perceived sense of control are negatively associated with emotional exhaustion (Ito & Brotheridge, 2003; Leiter, 1991; Meier, Semmer, Elfering, & Jacobshagen, 2008). In addition, research in social psychology and neuropsychology indicates that individuals believe that retaliation against offending others will make them feel better (Bushman, Baumeister, & Phillips, 2001; de Quervain et al., 2004). Thus, we expect that when employees experience low levels of distributive or procedural justice, production deviance and withdrawal may serve as emotion-focused coping and reduce emotional exhaustion. Hypothesis 2: Production deviance moderates the relationship between perceptions of justice and emotional exhaustion. The negative relationship between justice and emotional exhaustion is weaker when production deviance is frequent compared with infrequent.

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Hypothesis 3: Withdrawal moderates the relationship between perceptions of justice and emotional exhaustion. The negative relationship between justice and emotional exhaustion is weaker when withdrawal is frequent compared with infrequent.

the measures using t tests for independent samples and found no signicant differences.

Measures
Justice. Distributive justice was assessed with Price and Muellers (1986) six-item scale (e.g., Please rate the extent to which you are fairly rewarded considering the responsibilities that you have) using a scale of 1 (very unfairly) to 5 (very fairly; .94). Procedural justice was measured with Moormans (1991) 12-item scale (e.g., When decisions about other employees in general or you in particular are made in this company, the decisions are applied with consistency to the parties affected) using a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree; .95). CWB. The Counterproductive Work Behavior Checklist (CWB-C; Spector et al., 2006) contains three items for production deviance (e.g., Purposely did your work incorrectly; .66) and four items for withdrawal (e.g., Came to work late without permission; .69). The checklist uses a response scale of 1 (never) to 5 (every day). Although the coefcient alphas for these subscales are below accepted standards, the subscales of the CWB-C are considered causal indicator scales in which individual items are not interchangeable indicators of the underlying construct. Causal indicator scales, including measures of CWB and socioeconomic status, often result in lower estimated reliabilities because individual items dene the construct rather than acting as a reection of an underlying construct (Spector et al., 2006). Emotional exhaustion. Emotional exhaustion was assessed using six items from the Job-Related Affective Well-Being Scale (JAWS; Van Katwyk, Fox, Spector, & Kelloway, 2000). The JAWS assesses employees emotional reactions to their job by presenting a list of emotions, both positive and negative, and asking respondents to indicate how frequently they have experienced each over the past 30 days using a 5-point scale of 1 (never) to 5 (always). Because the JAWS is not typically used to assess emotional exhaustion, we asked two subject-matter experts (a PhD I/O psychologist and an advanced graduate student in I/O psychology) to read a brief description of emotional exhaustion, along with items from the Maslach Burnout Inventory (Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1996) and identify items from the JAWS that t the construct denition of emotional

Method Participants and Procedure

We recruited participants through the StudyResponse Project (2004), an online research participant panel with more than 95,000 participants. Researchers at Syracuse University designed this tool to provide social scientists with a means of conducting Web-based surveys with large, diverse samples. StudyResponse participants volunteer to be contacted for participation (Stanton & Weiss, 2002), and samples collected with this tool have been used in several recently published studies (e.g., Harris, Anseel, & Lievens, 2008; Piccolo & Colquitt, 2006). Based on the participant requirements that we provided (e.g., full-time employed adults living in the United States), StudyResponse e-mailed the initial recruitment notice, which included a brief description of the study, including time requirements, incentives offered (entry into a random drawing to receive one of 20 $50 gift certicates), and a link to the Webbased survey, followed by a reminder e-mail 1 week later to a random sample of 988 individuals in their participant pool; 522 individuals responded (52.8%). However, we dropped 124 cases because of responses to two items designed to detect nonconscientious responding (e.g., This item for key purposes only. Please select Agree.). We dropped an additional 103 cases because of substantial missing data, leaving 295 usable cases. Participants (44.5% men and 92% Caucasian) worked in a wide variety of jobs in a broad range of industries, including education, law enforcement, technology, government, transportation, nance, and health care. They ranged in age from 21 to 67 years (M 40.6 years) and in job tenure from 2 months to 37 years (M 7.18 years); 16.0% had a high school diploma, 35.8% had an associates degree or some college, 26.2% had a bachelors degree, 3.4% had completed some graduate work, 8.8% had a masters degree, and 4.8% had an advanced degree (5% did not respond to the question). Although we requested that participants work full-time, 20.8% worked parttime (40 hr/week). We compared mean scores of participants working full- versus part-time for each of

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Table 1 Scale Intercorrelations and Alpha Coefcient Reliabilities

Variable 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

1 (.94) .62 .01 .00 .38

2 (.95) .01 .03 .41

Distributive justice Procedural justice Production deviance Withdrawal Emotional exhaustion

(.66) .54 .27

(.69) .13

(.90)

Note. N 295. Reliability coefcients are presented along the main diagonal. p .05. p .01.

exhaustion. Working independently, the two raters achieved 100% agreement and identied the same six items from the original 30-item scale: depressed, discouraged, frustrated, gloomy, fatigued, and miserable ( .90).

Results
Intercorrelations and descriptive statistics of study variables are presented in Table 1. Hypothesis 1 was supported as both distributive and procedural justice were negatively correlated with emotional exhaustion (rs .38 and .41, respectively, ps .01). Hypotheses 2 and 3 predicted that production deviance and withdrawal, respectively, would moderate the relationship between justice perceptions and emotional exhaustion such that the relationships are weaker when CWB is frequent compared with infre-

quent. To test these hypotheses, we used hierarchical linear regression with two justice variables, distributive and procedural, and two types of CWB, productive deviance and withdrawal, as the main effects. Therefore, we estimated four hierarchical linear regression models predicting emotional exhaustion. We mean-centered all variables prior to conducting our analyses. For each model, we rst entered four control variables: tenure, hours worked per week, age, and gender. At the second step, we entered the main effect terms. At the third step, we entered the interaction terms (see Table 2). We found signicant interactions between distributive justice and withdrawal behaviors ( 0.60, R2 .02, p .01), distributive justice and production deviance ( 0.50, R2 .01, p .05), and procedural justice and withdrawal ( 0.42, R2 .01, p .05). However, the interaction between procedural justice and

Table 2 Hierarchical Regression Results

Variable Age Gender Tenure Hours per week Production deviance Withdrawal Distributive justice Procedural justice R2 Distributive Justice Production Deviance Procedural Justice Production Deviance Distributive Justice Withdrawal Procedural Justice Withdrawal R2 Change in R2 Model I .11 .07 .02 .11 .10

Model II .11 .03 .03 .12 .07

Model III .14 .04 .01 .09

Model IV .13 .002 .02 .11 .19 .64 .21

.67 .25 .50

.53 .25 .24

.30 .77 .19 .60 .21 .02

.26 .01

.25 .00

.42 .22 .01

Note. Standardized regression coefcients are presented from Step 3 in each model. p .05. p .01.

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Emotional Exhaustion

0.5 0 -0.5 -1 -1.5

Low Production Deviance Med Production Deviance High Production Deviance

Low Distributive Justice

High

Figure 1. The effect of perceptions of distributive justice on emotional exhaustion displayed by level of production deviance.

production deviance ( 0.24, R2 .00, ns) was nonsignicant. To explore the nature of the interactions, we plotted three lines using values of the moderator at the mean and 1 standard deviation above and below the mean (Preacher, Curran, & Bauer, 2006). As shown in Figure 1, the relationship between distributive justice and emotional exhaustion was weaker among employees who engaged in high levels of production deviance ( 0.17, ns) compared with those who engaged in low levels ( 1.17, p .01). Thus, Hypothesis 2 was partially supported. As displayed in Figures 2 and 3, withdrawal moderated the relationships between perceptions of low distributive and procedural justice and emotional exhaustion such that

the relationships were weaker among employees who engaged in high levels of withdrawal (s 0.17, ns, and 0.22, p .05, respectively) compared with those who engaged in low levels of withdrawal, (s 1.37 and 1.06, ps .01, respectively). Thus, Hypothesis 3 was fully supported.

Discussion
Leveraging the stressorstrain model and theories of coping, we investigated whether two forms of CWB, production deviance and withdrawal, mitigate the impact of low perceived justice on employee emotional exhaustion. We replicated past research indicating that individuals who experience low jus-

Emotional Exhaustion

1.5 1 0.5 0 -0.5 -1 -1.5 Low Withdrawal Med Withdrawal High Withdrawal

Low Distributive Justice

High

Figure 2. The effect of perceptions of distributive justice on emotional exhaustion displayed by level of withdrawal deviance.

CWB AS EMOTION-FOCUSED COPING

1.5 1 0.5 0 -0.5 -1 -1.00 Low Low Withdrawal Med Withdrawal High Withdrawal

161

Emotional Exhaustion

High1.00 Procedural Justice

Figure 3. The effect of perceptions of procedural justice on emotional exhaustion displayed by level of withdrawal deviance.

tice tend to experience more emotional exhaustion (Kausto, Elo, Lipponen, & Elovainio, 2005). This nding suggests that improving justice levels in the workplace will enhance worker well-being and reduce the need for workers to cope with stressful situations at work. In addition, although the idea that CWB may function as a form of coping has been raised before (Allen & Greenberger, 1980; Penney & Spector, 2007), ours is one of the rst empirical studies to examine whether performing certain types of CWB is associated with lower levels of an important psychological strain. In doing so, we contribute to the literature by investigating a potential instrumental use of CWB and answer Diefendorff and Mehtas (2007) concerns regarding the lack of research on motivations of employee CWB. Specically, we conrmed our expectations that employees may engage in production deviance and withdrawal CWB as an attempt to cope with low perceptions of justice, and this coping was successful under conditions of low distributive justice and, to some extent, low procedural justice. Although we did not capture causal direction or ordering, our results suggest that employees may engage in some CWB to actively shape their emotional experience at work rather than simply to react to affective events. We do not suggest, however, that this perspective should replace event-driven theories, but rather complements them and provides a broader view of employee behavior. We argued that withdrawal behaviors function as emotion-focused coping strategies to reduce emotional exhaustion by allowing employees to escape aversive situations and replenish emotional re-

sources. Our results support our assertions and indicate that the relationships between both distributive and procedural justice and emotional exhaustion are weaker among employees who engage in high as opposed to low levels of withdrawal. Thus, withdrawal behaviors, by minimizing employees exposure to unjust treatment by their employing organization, may protect employees from the strain of emotional exhaustion. We expected production deviance to function as emotion-focused coping to reduce emotional exhaustion by increasing employees perceived control by evening the score in the face of injustice (Adams, 1963), thereby reducing psychological strain. However, our hypothesis was only supported for distributive justice. When employees feel that the rewards and outcomes they receive are distributed unfairly, deliberately performing work slowly or incorrectly may enable them to reduce their inputs to restore equity, thereby reducing the negative emotions associated with low distributive justice. Unexpectedly, our results suggest that production deviance may not be an effective coping mechanism with respect to procedural justice. One possible explanation is that employees may derive perceptions of distributive justice from bonuses or pay raises, which are generally discrete events that occur on an annual basis. Thus, reducing inputs via acts of production deviance may be sufcient to restore the inequity resulting from these relatively discrete events, as well as restore employees sense of control. However, procedural justice perceptions may not be based on discrete events. According to Lev-

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enthal, Karuza, and Fry (1980), procedures will be perceived as fair to the extent that decisions are enacted in a manner that is without bias, based on accurate information, correctable, representative of the interests of all involved, and ethical. To the extent that procedural justice perceptions are based on a collection of events or decisions (e.g., decisions that determine pay raises, work schedules, vacation times, promotions, overtime, work assignments), acts of production deviance may not effectively restore employees sense of control and therefore may have little impact on emotional exhaustion. Alternatively, production deviance may be emotionally exhausting in and of itself. Compared with withdrawal behaviors that are passive, production deviance involves both active and passive behaviors (e.g., deliberately performing work incorrectly vs. working slowly).1 Because active forms of CWB may require investing more emotional energy, they may be emotionally exhausting. For example, production deviance was more strongly correlated with emotional exhaustion (r .27, p .01), compared with withdrawal (r .13, t(273) 2.51, p .01). Thus, although production deviance may be helpful in reducing ones emotional response to discrete events associated with distributive justice, the emotional cost may counteract the benet for responding to longer term events (i.e., procedural justice).

ance system. Providing an outlet for employees to reduce the negative physiological arousal associated with perceived stressors, such as access to exercise programs or facilities, as well as opportunities and encouragement to use these resources, may also reduce CWB. Organizations could also encourage employees to take breaks if they feel that they are becoming overwhelmed and distressed. Although breaks are typically considered CWB and a threat to productivity, our research suggests that breaks may actually have an indirect benet to the organization by reducing employees emotional exhaustion. However, additional research is needed to determine whether or not providing such outlets for employees mitigates the impact of low perceived justice on emotional exhaustion.

Limitations and Directions for Future Research

One limitation of our study is the cross-sectional nature of our data. Because emotional exhaustion and perceptions of injustice tend to build over time, longitudinal study designs would be better able to assess the directionality of the justiceCWB emotional exhaustion relationship. Moreover, qualitative studies may help better discern the specic motivations behind the performance of CWB. In addition, all study variables were assessed via self-report; therefore, common method variance may have articially inated the observed relationships. However, several models of stress (e.g., Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; Spector & Fox, 2005) emphasize the importance of the perception of events, as opposed to the events themselves, in precipitating strain outcomes. Also, emotional exhaustion is unlikely to be accurately assessed through other sources (e.g., peer report). Therefore, self-report is likely the best source of information regarding perceived stressors and the experience of emotional exhaustion. Regarding the use of self-reported measures of CWB, the Berry et al. (2007) meta-analysis reported that self- and non self-reported deviance were correlated .89, and the relationship between deviance and its correlates did not differ greatly when nonself-report was used. Finally, according to Spector (2006), commonmethod variance may be the exception rather than the rule. Thus, using self-report may not have signicantly affected our results. In fact, obtaining selfreport data through StudyResponse may have helped
1

Implications for Practice

This study presents a unique perspective on the motivations for engaging in CWB. We suggest that employees engage in some CWB because doing so is rewarding in terms of reducing emotional exhaustion. This presents an interesting paradox to practitioners. On the one hand, CWB has traditionally been considered harmful to organizations. On the other hand, CWB may be benecial for employees, particularly in situations of low distributive justice. Therefore, increasing perceptions of distributive justice, which is also associated with increased citizenship behavior, job satisfaction, and commitment (Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter, & Ng, 2001), should benet both organizations and employees. The current research also suggests that organizations aiming to reduce production deviance and withdrawal behaviors should consider the motivations that drive these behaviors. If organizations provide employees with other ways to cope with injustice, then employees may refrain from these forms of CWB. For example, organizations can provide employees with more control by developing a fair griev-

We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

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alleviate other problems, such as underreporting CWB (R. M. Lee, 1993), given that responses were completely anonymous. Another limitation of our study is that we used six items from the JAWS (Van Katwyk et al., 2000) to measure emotional exhaustion instead of a more established and validated scale. Although two independent raters achieved perfect agreement in identifying JAWS items that t the construct denition of emotional exhaustion, research has not directly assessed the validity of this subscale for assessing emotional exhaustion. Therefore, our criterion variable may be more reective of a narrow set of negative emotional experiences than of emotional exhaustion. We did not assess personality in our study, although some traits are associated with the performance of CWB (e.g., negative affectivity, conscientiousness, agreeableness; Berry et al., 2007). In addition, Connor-Smith and Flachsbarts (2007) recent meta-analysis suggests that personality may play a role in determining an individuals coping style. Therefore, the use of CWB as emotion-focused coping may vary depending on employees personality traits. Further research is needed to examine this possibility. We found no evidence in our sample that engaging in CWB is rewarding under conditions of moderate to high perceptions of justice, which begs the question, Why do individuals engage in CWB in these conditions? Perhaps employees learn that CWB can be rewarding in situations of low perceived justice and then continue to engage in these behaviors even after a situation is rectied. More research is needed to address the reasons why individuals engage in CWB in high justice conditions. We also focused on distributive and procedural justice as stressors that employees may perceive to be beyond their control. However, additional research is needed to investigate whether the impact of other uncontrollable stressors (e.g., customers, crowding, downsizing) may also be mitigated by production deviance or withdrawal. We also recognize that other forms of CWB may serve an instrumental purpose as well as an emotional one (Spector et al., 2006). For instance, an employee may yell at a coworker to work harder or faster, and this may clue management in to a problem or result in improved coworker performance. As Lazarus (1996) noted, the distinction between problem- and emotionfocused coping is not always clear, as attempts to directly reduce a stressor (i.e., problem-focused coping) may also help an individual reduce his or her negative emotions. We encourage researchers to consider the instrumental use of other forms of CWB

(e.g., abuse against others), as well as other potential positive effects of CWB on the individual (e.g., decreased negative emotion, improved performance) and the organization (e.g., increased productivity). One of the strengths of this study is that participants were employed in a wide range of industries and jobs. Hence, our results may be more generalizable than studies that are limited to employees in a single organization or occupation. However, we had to drop a number of cases because of either nonconscientious responding or excessive missing data. Perhaps because respondents participated to be entered into a random drawing to receive one of 20 $50 incentives, some may have chosen to respond to few questions or respond nonconscientiously simply to be entered into the drawing. Given the growing popularity of online research tools such as StudyResponse, more research may be needed to understand the nonconscientious responding and missing data issues that may occur with the use of these tools. Finally, an important qualication of our argument needs to be made. CWB occurs in the context of a person organization interaction (Spector & Fox, 2005). The unfolding nature of this interaction may affect the degree to which CWB can reduce emotional exhaustion. For instance, if employees continuously perform work slowly or incorrectly, take more breaks than allowed, or arrive to work late, they may be reprimanded by the organization or even red. In addition, these behaviors may anger coworkers, causing more stress for the focal employee. Furthermore, to the extent that performance and attendance are associated with nancial rewards, employees may hurt themselves by decreasing their productivity or withdrawing. From a cost-benet perspective, the coping benet of performing these CWB over the long-term may be outweighed by the cost. Therefore, although we suggest that CWB can be benecial to individuals, we recognize that there may be more boundary conditions to this argument than we have set.

Conclusion
This study served as an initial investigation into the possible instrumental use of engaging in certain CWB as a means of coping with job stressors. Although additional research is needed to replicate our ndings, withdrawal and production deviance appear to reduce employee emotional exhaustion when employees are faced with an uncontrollable stressor (i.e., low justice). Because emotional exhaustion has been linked to lowered employee motivation, engagement,

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KRISCHER, PENNEY, AND HUNTER De Boer, E. M., Bakker, A. B., Syroit, J. E., & Schaufeli, W. B. (2002). Unfairness at work as a predictor of absenteeism. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 23, 181197. de Quervain, D. J., Fischbacher, U., Treyer, V., Schellhammer, M., Schnyder, U., Buck, A., & Fehr, E. (2004, August 27). The neural basis of altruistic punishment. Science, 305, 1254 1258. Diefendorff, J. M., & Mehta, K. (2007). The relations of motivational traits with workplace deviance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92, 967977. Etzion, D., Eden, D., & Lapidot, Y. (1998). Relief from job stressors and burnout: Reserve service as a respite. Journal of Applied Psychology, 83, 577585. Fasolo, P. M. (1995). Procedural justice and perceived organizational support: Hypothesized effects on job performance. In R. S. Cropanzano & K. M. Kacmar (Eds.), Organizational politics, justice, and support: Managing the social climate of the workplace (pp. 185195). Westport, CT: Quorum Books. Folger, R., & Skarlicki, D. P. (2005). Beyond counterproductive work behavior: Moral emotions and deontic retaliation versus reconciliation. In S. Fox & P. E. Spector (Eds.), Counterproductive work behavior: Investigations of actors and targets (pp. 83106). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Folkman, S., & Lazarus, R. S. (1980). An analysis of coping in a middle-aged community sample. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 21, 219 239. Folkman, S., & Lazarus, R. S. (1985). If it changes it must be a process: Study of emotion and coping during three stages of a college examination. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48, 150 170. Folkman, S., Lazarus, R. S., Dunkel-Schetter, C., DeLongis, A., & Gruen, R. J. (1986). Dynamics of a stressful encounter: Cognitive appraisal, coping, and encounter outcomes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 9921003. Fox, S., Spector, P. E., & Miles, D. (2001). Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) in response to job stressors and organizational justice: Some mediator and moderator tests for autonomy and emotions. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 59, 291309. Fritz, C., & Sonnentag, S. (2005). Recovery, health, and job performance: Effects of weekend experiences. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 10, 187199. Go ral, F. S., Kesimci, A., & Genc o z, T. (2006). Roles of the controllability of the event and coping strategies on stress-related growth in a Turkish sample. Stress and Health: Journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress, 22, 297303. Grant, S., & Langan-Fox, J. (2006). Occupational stress, coping and strain: The combined/interactive effect of the Big Five traits. Personality and Individual Differences, 41, 719 732. Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging eld of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2, 271299. Halbesleben, J., & Bowler, W. (2007). Emotional exhaustion and job performance: The mediating role of motivation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92, 93106. Halbesleben, J., & Buckley, M. R. (2004). Burnout in organizational life. Journal of Management, 30, 859 879. Harris, M., Anseel, F., & Lievens, F. (2008). Keeping up

and job performance (Halbesleben & Bowler, 2007), these forms of CWB may actually benet rather than harm organizations (Wright & Cropanzano, 1998). We encourage future research to address this counterintuitive implication.

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Received June 3, 2009 Revision received September 11, 2009 Accepted October 18, 2009 y