Explainingworkplace delinquency: The role of Honesty–Humility, ethical culture, and employee surveillance

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: HEXACO Honesty–Humility Conscientiousness Ethical culture Employee surveillance Workplace delinquency Occupational crime Routine Activity Theory In this research the effects of personality and organizational characteristics on workplace delinquency were investigated. In a sample of 455 respondents from a wide variety of organizations, two personality traits, HEXACO Honesty–Humility and Conscientiousness, and two organizational characteristics, ethical culture and employee surveillance, explained a significant amount of variance in workplace delinquency. No interaction effects between personality and organizational practices in the explanation of workplace delinquency were found. Results are discussed in light of the role of personality and Routine Activity Theory in predicting unethical behaviors, delinquency, and/or occupational crime in organizations. Workplace delinquency is extremely costly for organizations. For instance, employee theft in the retail sector alone had an estimated cost of $18.1 billion in lost revenue in 2012 in the U.S. (Hollinger & Adams, 2014). Figures such as these may even be conservative, given that they do not take into account 'gray' zones of workplace delinquency , such as 'time' theft, 'job benefit' losses (e.g., telephone misuse), vandalism, and lower performance due to, for instance, drug use at work. Furthermore, loss estimates may be much higher still if one takes into account additional social costs, such as ensuing conflicts and distrust among employers and employees. Consequently, for organizations , the prevention of workplace delinquency carries major financial and social benefits. Prevention can take two forms: 1) selection of the 'right' employees, and 2) modification of employee behaviors through (informal and formal) organizational control systems. In this study, we examine both. Specifically, we focus on employee integrity as captured by the HEXACO Honesty–Humility personality trait, which has been found to be the most important personality predictor of (workplace) delinquency (e.g., Lee, Ashton, & De Vries, 2005), and on two organizational control systems, that is a) an organization's ethical culture and b) its use of employee surveillance practices. Additionally, we investigate whether Honesty–Humility interacts with ethical culture and employee surveillance in the explanation of workplace delinquency. The HEXACO model of personality posits that personality is most optimally described using six dimensions that together form the (Lee & Ashton, 2004). Like its predecessor, the Big Five model of personality (Goldberg, 1990), the HEXACO model is grounded in a cross-cultural lexical approach, and although there is still debate on the 'optimal' structure of personality, recent evidence …