Deviance in organizations

Name

Institution

Organization deviance

Organizational deviance is a behavior that goes against the norms of an organization. Some of these behaviors include stealing, withholding efforts and information, and any form of aggression. Workplace harassment by the managers is one cause of deviance in workers as they copy what they observe. This make the working place hostile to everyone and the morale of the workers is demoralized and the interpersonal relations are broken down (Adler & Adler 2006).

The main factors that contribute to organizational deviance are organizational, personal and social/interpersonal. The personal factors include demographics and personality type. Organizational factors are greed, age, tenure, and education among others. The social/interpersonal causes are group influence, supervisors’ influence, dissimilarity, debts etc.

The organizational causes of deviance include culture of the organization, its commitment, its justice stress among others. The individual organizations have ways of dealing with deviance. This practice sometimes gets out of control as some of the activities of the deviant employees go against the organization ethics. However, hardworking an employee might be, he or she should not be allowed to engage in criminal activities like theft, sexual harassment among other practices that spoil the name of the company (Adler & Adler 2006).

Many companies view deviance actions as a normal thing within the workplace but these acts can be reduced if the environment at the workplace is more relaxed and friendly. Research done on the factors that encourage deviance among workers revealed that the more the organizational rules, the higher the cases of deviance. On the other hand, when an organization has fewer rules, there are minimal cases of deviance. The deviants who act on behalf of the company should also face the full force of the law if found guilty. These may be involved in corporate crimes, organized crimes or white-collar crimes, depending on the rules of individual companies the deviants may be found guilty or not (Adler & Adler 2006).

In conclusion organization deviance has the potential to spoil the image of a company, affect employees’ morale and reduce productivity and profits and lead to legal action against the organization should the affect patties seek legal redress. In this regard companies should use all means and resource avail to prevent and punish deviance.

Reference

Adler, P. A., & Adler, P. (2006). Constructions of deviance: Social power, context, and interaction. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth.