Question

To what extent can organisations minimize counterproductive or deviant behavior? Discuss

Answer 1

Deviant behaviours fall beyond what an organisation consider acceptable behaviours. They may include behaviours such as late coming, theft, bullying, harassment and other misconducts.

Generally, organisations have many tools to minimise deviant behaviours. These tools include recruitment policies, training schemes, goals, reward or compensation schemes, established values, organisational structure, external auditors, etc. For instance, a firm extracts the right performance behaviour from its sales team by linking their performance with a valuable reward. That is, if they achieve x-sales, the team is entitled to this reward. The requisite behaviour is x-sales; anything below x could be considered deviant behaviour.

Also, a firm uses predetermined criteria to select new hires, and key at bay those it considered might have deviant behaviours. New hires are trained to the firm's work standards and values.

Though these tools help a firms to minimise deviant behaviours, they are imperfect. Simply because, the causes and origins of deviant behaviours are complex, ambiguous and hard to detect or even explain. For instance, why does a hardworking, high-achieving CEO in 2010 turns out to have sexually harassed one of its staff? This shows how difficult is it to check deviant behaviours.

However, in most companies, the tools identified above are used to keep deviance at a minimum level possible.