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The purpose of this inductive, exploratory study is to provide foundational insights into the role of management control in dealing with dysfunctional behaviour within accounting schools in changing environment of Australian universities.

Evidence is drawn from semi-structured interviews with 28 current or previous heads of school, research deans, deans of teaching and learning, school managers and human resource managers from 16 Australian universities and interpreted from the theoretical perspective of rational choice theory.

The findings suggest the incidence of a range of dysfunctional behaviours occurring in accounting schools. Even when such behaviours are limited in frequency, their consequences are nevertheless found to have far-ranging and potentially destructive change impacts for both individuals and the university. Formal management control systems designed to address such behaviours are perceived to be largely ineffective in identifying, managing, eliminating or even mitigating the consequences of such dysfunctionality. Instead, it is informal control processes that are preferred in dealing with dysfunctionality.

This study enhances our understanding of the role of management control in dealing with dysfunctional behaviour within university accounting schools, and points not only to the difference between the design and use of management controls but also to the implications of this disconnect between the underlying intent of control design and their actual use in the context of environments that are subject to significant change.

While the positive effects of customer citizenship behavior are well established, research on its potential negative consequences is scarce. This study aims to examine the indirect relationship between customer citizenship and dysfunctional customers via customer moral credits and entitlement, as well as the moderating influence of customer citizenship fatigue.

Study 1 employed a cross-sectional design with a self-administered survey. The data were collected from 314 customers using an online research panel. In Study 2, the authors manipulated customer citizenship behavior using 203 participants to establish causality and rule out alternative explanations of the findings of Study 1. In Study 3, the authors replicated Study 2 and enhanced internal validity by using a more controlled experimental design using 128 participants.

This study shows that when customer citizenship fatigue is high, customer citizenship behavior elicits customer moral credit, which leads to customer entitlement and, in turn, promotes dysfunctional customer behavior. Conversely, when customer citizenship fatigue is low, customer citizenship behavior does not generate moral credit or entitlement, preventing dysfunctional customer behavior.

The study shows that promoting customer citizenship behavior does not always lead to positive outcomes. Therefore, when promoting customer citizenship behavior, managers should consider the psychological licensing process and ways to mitigate the influence of moral credits.

This study challenges common wisdom and investigates the dark side of customer citizenship behavior. Specifically, it demonstrates that customer citizenship behavior could backfire (e.g. dysfunctional customer behavior). It also shows that only customers who experience a high level of fatigue from their citizenship behaviors are psychologically licensed to gain moral credit, leading to dysfunctional customer behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the experiences of employees who are exposed to dysfunctional behaviors by their leaders in a healthcare organization.

This study employed a qualitative methodology drawing on 25 semi-structured interviews with administrative and clinical employees working in a healthcare setting operating in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

This study’s findings provide insights into dysfunctional leadership phenomena based on employees’ personal experiences with dysfunctional leaders. Dysfunctional leaders have several harmful behaviors, such as behaving in abusive ways, marginalizing others, engaging in favoritism, and degrading employees. This study also demonstrated that the leaders’ negative behavior directly influences employees to leave their jobs, contributes to feelings of alienation at work, reduces their commitment, and frequently creates serious psychological and physical problems. This study also discovered that over time the negative effects of a dysfunctional leader do not stop at employees; it also filters through to other areas such as the organizational environment and family life.

Dysfunctional leadership is under-studied within the context of the Middle Eastern region. Therefore, this study’s findings provide theoretical and practical implications. It provides information about employee experiences and how dysfunctional behavior influences individuals and, ultimately, organizational life. Furthermore, this study has value to practitioners by offering suggestions for organizational interventions for creating more effective policies and programs to support employees’ careers and well-being.

This paper introduces the concept of dysfunctional customer behavior toward a brand and argues that when customers perceive that a brand has failed to fulfill its promises, a psychological brand contract breach occurs, which in turn leads to a psychological brand contract violation, which evokes dysfunctional customer behavior toward the brand. In addition, this study investigates whether the impact of a breach of this contract is dependent on brand relationship quality, brand apology and restitution.

Study 1 conducted the online survey and 224 respondents were used for data analysis and the moderating role of brand relationship quality was examined. Study 2 conducted an experiment with 201 participants to test the moderating role of brand apology and restitution.

This study found the moderating role of brand relationship quality, brand apology and brand restitution on the relationship between a psychological brand contract breach and dysfunctional customer behavior toward a brand (i.e. brand-negative word-of-mouth, brand retaliation and brand boycott), which is mediated by psychological brand contract violation.

This study contributes to the theoretical understanding of dysfunctional customer behavior toward a brand by integrating the literature on brand management with the organizational literature on psychological contracts between organizations and their employees. Furthermore, this study sheds light on the effectiveness of reparative actions by the firm after occurrence of the psychological brand contract breach.

The purpose of this article is to expand and extend previous work on the role of organizations in influencing deviant or dysfunctional behavior in those organizations.

Conclusions from previous work on the role of individuals and organizations in influencing dysfunctional behavior is used to lead to a discussion of the interactions between those two especially through organizational culture and leadership.

A model is developed that more carefully identifies how all of these factors come together, resulting in no, little, some, or a lot of dysfunctional behavior.

The model developed here can be employed to improve understanding of the role of organization culture and leadership in motivating dysfunctional work behaviors. Both the individual and the organization constructs utilized in the framework need more complete conceptual development. In each instance, a more complex and integrative analysis of diverse literatures needs to be undertaken. Clear messages regarding individual tendencies toward violent behaviors are embedded in the literatures from such diverse areas as psychology, psychiatry, criminal justice, medicine, sociology, organizational behavior, biology, social psychology, and anthropology. A comprehensive review and synthesis could theoretically yield far more insights than currently exist.

The proposed manifestations of dysfunctional behavior are most likely to occur as the result of the interactive relationship between an individual displaying a relatively high predisposition for violent behavior and an organization with a relatively high propensity to elicit violence. Clearly, a better understanding of the characteristics of such an organization would assist practicing managers in reducing the likelihood of occurrence of dysfunctional behavior.

This paper fills a gap in the literature about the role of organizations in influencing dysfunctional behavior by delineating more fully the role of organizational culture and leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight important issues in the study of dysfunctional customer behavior and to provide a research agenda to inspire, guide, and enthuse. Through a critical evaluation of existing research, the aim is to highlight key issues and to present potentially worthy avenues for future study.

In reviewing recent and past advances in the study of customers behaving badly, an overview of existing research into customers behaving badly and addressing issues of terminology and definition is provided. Thereafter, three perspectives that provide the most opportunity and insight in studying the darker side of service dynamics are outlined. This leads to a review of some of the research design and methodological problems and issues that are faced when rigorously studying these issues. Subsequently, the paper devotes a section to the provocative idea that while dysfunctional customer behavior has many negative influences on customers, employees, and service firms, there are actually some positive functions of customers behaving badly.

A research agenda is provided that is believed to identify and discuss a range of projects that comprises not only insightful theoretical contributions but is also practically relevant.

The paper identifies a range of issues about which managers should be aware and proactively manage.

Dysfunctional customer behavior is believed to engender employee stress and, in turn, fuel employee turnover. However, little research has examined the moderating role of individual-level and contextual-level resource variables. The purpose of this paper is to fill these gaps by examining employee embeddedness and individualism–collectivism as putative moderators of the hypothesized mediation chain.

The authors conducted a field study involving 264 service employees working in two hotels operated by the same international hotel chain, one in South Korea (n=138) and the other in the UK (n=126).

Results show that employee embeddedness weakens the impact of dysfunctional customer behavior on employee turnover via employee stress. In addition, findings suggest that collectivists (individualists) are more (less) likely to be receptive to embeddedness cues.

This is the first known study to show that employee embeddedness can mitigate the impact of dysfunctional customer behavior on turnover via employee stress. This moderated-mediation model is further moderated by employees’ cultural value orientation (individualism–collectivism). Prior literature is not explicit on these complex models.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the factors that may result in a high turnover rate of auditors in Macau. The factors considered include client importance, task complexity, time budget constraints, auditor independence and acceptance of dysfunctional behaviour by Macau's audit firms.

This study involved three stages. In the first stage, interviews were carried out with auditors from Big‐4 (seven interviewees) and local non‐Big‐4 firms (three interviewees) in Macau to investigate the reasons for the high turnover rate amongst auditors in Macau. They were asked to speculate about common explanatory factors. The second stage involved 141 auditors from Big‐4 and local non‐Big‐4 accounting firms who were asked to complete a questionnaire survey for the explanatory factors. A total of 135 usable questionnaires were included in the multiple regression data analysis. The third stage of research comprised follow‐up interviews aimed at learning more about the reasons for dysfunctional behaviour.

This research provides valuable information for audit firms in Macau and will potentially help them to reduce their turnover rate and identify the factors affecting dysfunctional behaviour amongst auditors. The results extend the literature by focusing on the effect of perceived responsibility on professional responses to time budget pressures, task complexity, pressure from clients, and professional and ethical issues.

The challenge facing auditors today is to expand their auditing practices and evolve standards for adequately monitoring the operations of business entities. The current high turnover rate alarms audit firms, which are concerned with training and the provision of sufficient resources to solve the problems that auditors face in the workplace.

This is the first paper to examine the reason for turnover intentions in Macau. This study sheds light on the factors that contribute to individual auditor differences in the acceptance of dysfunctional behaviour that may result from the stressful nature of their duties.

The financial scandals in Malaysia have caused auditors to be convicted of such failure and led to the claims that they were involved in dysfunctional audit behavior. The incidences have worsened the profession’s credibility and deteriorated the public confidence on the profession. This study aims to examine the influence of professional skills, independence, work experience, time budget pressure on dysfunctional audit behavior.

This study collected primary data based on a questionnaire survey among audit firms in the Klang Valley area and registered with Malaysian Institutes of Accountants.

The findings from a survey conducted on 130 Malaysian auditors proved that time budget pressure is significantly influenced the dysfunctional audit behavior. However, this study did not support the relationship between professional skills, independence, work experience and dysfunctional audit behavior.

This study contributed to the researchers, auditors as well as educators in further understanding the factors that might influence the dysfunctional audit behavior. The findings are expected to help in improving the auditors’ credibility and uphold the public confidence on the auditing profession.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate individual or personal factors contributing to individual auditor differences in acceptance of dysfunctional audit behaviour (DAB). Dysfunctional behaviour and staff turnover are associated with decreased audit quality, and is characterised as premature sign‐off, gathering of insufficient evidence, accepting of weak client explanation, altering or replacing the audit procedures, and under‐reporting of time, and have negative effects on the auditing profession. In this study the organizational behaviour and industrial psychology literatures provide the basis for the development and testing of an individual factors’ model of DAB.

Using path analysis for direct and indirect effects, survey results from registered Audit Managers are used to provide support for an explanatory model.

Overall, results indicate that auditors who are more accepting of dysfunctional behaviour tend to possess an external locus of control and exhibit higher turnover intentions.

These results suggest that individual factors play a role in identifying those who are more accepting of dysfunctional behaviour. The results can be useful in the operational and management control mechanism of human and social developments relating to dysfunctional behaviour issues.