Search results

Misbehavior is ubiquitous. Its occurrence stretches back in time and shows little sign of abating. According to Richards (2008, pp. 653–654), organizational misbehavior “has been a prominent feature of organizational studies throughout the twentieth century and continues to command similar attention in the first decade of the twenty-first century.” Early interest has been traced back to F. W. Taylor's criticisms of workers’ restriction of output (Taylor, 2003) in the first two decades of the twentieth century, a phenomenon also considered by Donald Roy (1952, 1959) after World War Two, and subsequently extended by Jason Ditton (1977) and Gerald Mars (1982) to include workplace crimes such as “fiddles and theft.” In more recent times, such fiddles have been extended to the study of “cyberslacking” (Block, 2001), “cyberloafing” (Lim, 2002), and general workplace internet misuse (Lara, Tacoronte, Ding, & Ting, 2006). Yet, despite such interest in “organizational misbehavior,” the scholarship in this field is relatively recent and generally traced back to the work of Vardi and Wiener (1996) and Ackroyd and Thompson (1999).

Purpose – This chapter seeks to contribute to our understanding of how the delivery of customer service shapes the development and expression by workers of resistance, misbehavior, and accommodation. Workers at three call centers enjoyed customer service and endeavored to enhance its importance. At the same time, however, they knew it to be emotionally wearing and, on occasion, morally dubious.

Methodology – The chapter draws on interviews with and a survey of call center employees and management and trade unions.

Findings – The chapter explores how workers used the aesthetic skills that underpin “good” customer service to subvert management objectives and give vent to their frustration with disgruntled customers.

Social implications – Even in the most closely controlled and monitored situations, people are capable of developing unanticipated and often ingenious responses to regimens that are antithetical to their immediate interests.

Originality – The exploration of how call center workers use their customer service and aesthetic skills to undermine managerial control.

Purpose – The chapter analyses potential interconnections between competing strands of worker misbehavior and mischief that result in forms of active resistance for those workers employed in nonunion settings.

Design/methodology/approach – The analysis integrates extant literature and theory concerned with differences between resistance, mischief and misbehavior on the one hand, and patterns of nonunion and unorganized workplace relations on the other.

Findings – Using a revised conceptual framework that advances a deeper and more nuanced understanding of unorganized workplace resistance, mischief, and misbehavior, the chapter illustrates the role that institutional and structural regulation plays in delineating between formal (and often collective) indicators of conflict, and informal (sometimes individualized) instances of mischief and misbehavior.

Research limitations/implications – The chapter offers a potential schematic framework for future researchers seeking to explore the complex interactions between resistance and misbehavior in a global and increasingly nonunion context.

Originality/value – While researchers have observed the quantitative decline in unionized conflict and industrial action, this chapter argues for a more inclusive incorporation of employment relations institutions to understand the deeper qualitative affects on workforce misbehaviors.

Purpose – This chapter seeks to understand the concept of consumer misbehavior, especially in the form of consumer deviance and/or dysfunction.

Method/approach – We review the marketing literature on consumer misbehavior, organizing the major themes scholars have used. We also differentiate between two perspectives researchers can employ: (1) misbehavior as deviance and (2) misbehavior as a wider construct.

Findings – Marketers generally overlook consumer misbehavior and put the cost down as that of running a business. Furthermore, they are burdened by the notion of customer sovereignty which is the dictum that “customers are always right.” But customers also lie, cheat, steal, harass, and abuse. Consumer misbehavior is thus multifaceted which in turn makes the definition difficult to pin down. After reviewing the many definitions of consumer misbehavior, including cyber misbehavior, the authors concluded that the disruption perspective is more managerially useful than the perspective based on violation of norms. This is because disruption of the business is not only harmful or unlawful but can lead to a loss of well-being, material resources, and reputation of individuals and/or organizations.

Implications – The chapter proposes a Pre-di-post framework that can be used to deal with customer misbehavior.

Originality/value – Most marketing scholars have focused primarily on misbehavior as deviance, yet this limits the kinds of problems one tends to focus on and the range of solutions one normally considers. We offer an alternative perspective where misbehavior may be instead “an unremarkable consequence of normal conditions” which may suggest a wider range of amelioration strategies.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to offer a general review of the field of organizational misbehavior and to pose the question: what has happened in this field in the last twenty years?

Method – The chapter uses the theoretical framework developed in the book Organizational Misbehavior (1999) as a template and considers a range of developments in organizations and their context together with the findings of much new research into organizational misbehavior.

Findings – Classic forms of misbehavior identified in earlier work (absenteeism, effort limitation, utilitarian sabotage, etc.) are not as significant as they once were because the conditions necessary for the co-production of these forms of misbehavior often no longer apply. It is also proposed, however, that the findings from a great deal of the more recent literature – that there has been a proliferation in the range and types of organizational misbehavior and increase in its subtlety – are not indicative of a decline in the impulse to misbehave nor of the significance of misbehavior more generally. On the contrary, what we see is indicative of a period of widespread behavioral innovation, in which new outlets for the impulse to misbehave are finding expression even against a background of a general shift in the balance of power in favor of the employer. In the longer term there is every reason to expect that new areas of significant contestation will re-emerge, and with this the crystallization of some new and distinctive forms of misbehavior.

Social implications – A clear implication of the analysis is that there is little reason for complacency on the part of managers and management academics that the problem of misbehavior has disappeared.

Value of chapter – Updating the findings in the book Organizational Misbehavior (1999) in light of a range of recent developments in organizations and their context, together with recent research into organizational misbehavior.