Have you ever taken office supplies home? Stole some pens and paper from your employer for your kids' arts and crafts class? Used the office printer to print personal concert tickets?
In a recent anonymous survey by Papermate as part of the launch of a new pen, 100 per cent of office workers admitted to have stolen a pen at work. Other academic researchers have reported that up to 75 per cent of employees admitted to stealing office supplies in the past year.
The damage in economic terms caused by these ``petty theft'' behaviours have been valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, may be responsible for roughly 35 per cent of an organization's inventory shrinkage annually, and an average of 1.4 per cent of its total revenues.
So if these behaviours are so harmful to our economy, why do we engage in them?
When you start a new job, your employer tends to make a series of promises to you with regards to your employment that are not necessarily part of your written contract.
Imagine that your employer promised you ``flexible working hours'' and a ``collegial work environment.'' By making these promises, your employer has created a set of expectations. These expectations form the basis of what we call a psychological contract.
As long as your employer keeps up its part of the deal, you will be a happy, committed and loyal employee. The only imperfection to this situation is that it rarely exists. We know that over time, employers and employees' perceptions of what was promised may start to drift apart.
Broken promises
In reality, a lot of people will perceive that their employer is deviating from its original promises. Indeed, about 55 per cent of employees report that their employer broke promises within the first two years of employment, and 65 per cent of employees have experienced a broken promise within the last year.
More recently, researchers have found that employees experience broken promises at a weekly and even daily rate.
At this point you are probably thinking: ``So if they break their promises so often, they must at least apologize for them, right?'' Sadly enough, a series of recent findings has indicated that employers hardly ever seem to notice that they did something wrong.
As a consequence, they only try to justify or rectify their actions about six per cent to 37 per cent of the times. It therefore seems that employers break promises rather frequently, but they do not seem to acknowledge their wrongdoing or intervene to offer a solution.
If you wrong us, shall we not be vengeful?
Because these promises are such a central part of your employment agreement, you feel that when your employer breaks them, you can take what is ``rightfully'' yours.
Employees who experience broken promises tend to experience a series of very intense negative emotions such as anger, frustration and outrage, which in turn will lead to a higher desire to dominate, retaliate and get even with the employer.
Moreover, researchers found that this effect was most profound among those who were excellent at their jobs and expected to be treated fairly, meaning that an organization's best employees are most likely to be ``vengeful'' in the face of broken promises.
Some studies have also demonstrated that some people seem to enjoy behaving vengefully, especially when they are in a higher status role and when they feel more dominant. So when we add one and one together, we notice that the combination of ``a desire to retaliate'' and ``enjoying enacting vengeful'' leads to a positive reinforcement of this behaviour.
As a consequence, employees are far more likely to be vengeful in the future when they are confronted with a broken promise because they mainly experienced positive consequences of their negative behaviour.
Article published in: HR Canadian Reporter /published on May 23, 2018
Article Written by: Yannick Griep
Article Spotted by: Louise Burden