Productive Behavior and Counterproductive Behavior

Productive behavior and Counterproductive Behavior

As organization strive to obtain the goals and mission's management must focus on how he or she will achieve the goals with the current employees. At some point in the work environment managers will face employees that are not contributing to the success of the organization. The behavior traits that employees display at work are productive behavior or counterproductive behavior. In this paper the focus is how does productive and counterproductive behavior impact job performance and recommend strategies to increase productive behavior and decrease counterproductive behavior.

Productive behavior in the simplest terms is behavior that contributes to an organizations goals and objectives. The productive behavior of employees is achieved by job performance, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and innovation (Jex, 2008). Job performance is the actual work that an employee engage in that adds to the purposes of the organization. With job performance an employee can manage how he or she performs at work. In the job performance model according to Campbell in-role and extra-role performance are additional components of job performance. In-role is the technical aspect of the job, while extra-role is the non-technical performance. Organizational citizenship behavior is the ability to work beyond the scope of a job description. Organizational citizenship behavior is different from in-role and extra-role performance, OCB is positive interaction with co-workers such as friendliness, helpfulness, and promoting a team oriented environment (Jex, 2008). If an employee has a level of job satisfaction he or she will display positive actions and feel that he or she is treated fairly in the organization. Innovations is an employee's abilities to stay abreast of new technology that will create efficiencies in the organization.

Counterproductive behavior is behavior not conducive to an organizational goal. In organizational psychology counterproductive behavior is ineffectiveness job performance, absenteeism, attrition and accidents; however it is not limited to just the three. Counterproductive behavior can be intentional or unintentional if there are inefficiencies in the organization. To understand if an employee action is intentional or unintentional performance data can assist with detecting trends or behavioral patterns. Performance data which is a common form of counterproductive behavior consist of the four types of data: personal data, production data, subjective evaluation, and electronic performance monitoring. For the purpose of this paper only personal and production data will be expound on. With the use of personal data if an employee is absent more than an acceptable number of days or hours could be indicative of substance abuse, family issues, or environmental issues at work. The remaining less frequently forms of counterproductive