Love, hate, ambivalence, or indifference? A conceptual examination of workplace crimes and organizational identification

摘要

Workplace crimes are of different types and past research is found to be incomplete and gives conflicting findings. The present research work aims at developing a typology of workplace crimes based on intended outcomes. It has also focused on individual-organizational relationships as individuals' motivations for workplace crimes and show how relationships shape crime propensities in very different ways. A bottom-up approach to build a typology of workplace crimes has been adopted to present a theoretical framework that provides a parsimonious explanation for what motivates different types of workplace crimes. Based on previous research findings, the typology of workplace crimes have been broadly classified into three categories. The typologies showed that each type of workplace crime has a different motivation: to benefit, harm, or have no effect on the organization. The research work further probes why individuals would intend to hurt, benefit, or ignore the organization when committing a crime and discusses the key motivator in determining whether and which type of crime is committed. In conjunction with several research works, the concept of organizational identification and four pathologies have been discussed. The theoretical and practical contributions of the research have been discussed.