Workplace Deviance: A Non-Western Perspective

Definition

Deviance is defined as actions that are opposed to generally accepted norms or violate acceptable behaviours within a society. Much of the deviant literature emphasises how the divergence from acceptable standards or behaviour is deviant. However, this begs the question: what happens when an acceptable norm is unethical or ought to be? In response, this entry calls into question the work-chop phenomenon in Nigeria. The work-chop phenomenon supports using dishonest means for personal gain. It is promoted via a repetitive statement that appeals to the listeners’ cognition and sentiments. Its prevalence makes it a norm in some sense, so defining deviance from a Western perspective alone leaves room for this nuanced phenomenon to go unnoticed in the literature. Based on secondary research and normative ethical theories, the authors argue that work-chop is ethical deviance because its means and ends are not mutually beneficial to the parties involved.

1. Introduction

Much of the deviant literature emphasises how the follower’s or employees’ divergence from acceptable standards or behaviour is deviant or bad. However, defining deviance from such a Westernised perspective alone could leave room for the mislabelling of inherently unethical behaviours that are viewed as acceptable norms. Hence, the work-chop phenomenon is introduced to the academic literature as unethical behaviour, which may only have been experienced in the discussed non-Western context. This means a nuanced interpretation of deviance is important given that the characterisation in the extant literature falls flat in the face of a different context. Based on an objective ethical position, this entry makes a compelling case for situating work-chop as ethical deviance. Additionally, it highlights the leader–follower relationship, particularly emphasising how leaders contribute to enabling followers’ work-chopping behaviours. Hence, although the study is delimited to the specificities of deviant behaviours within a specific context, it is not necessarily about the criticism of a people group. Instead, the argument is that there are differences in how these behaviours are perceived or enacted in non-Western settings. Geoghegan [1] commented that ‘In modern-day Britain, the law-abiding are being treated as oppressors while the criminals get off scot-free’ further accentuates the moral decadence of humans in a fallen world, be it in the first or third world. The profundity and simplicity of the message conveyed in this entry highlight the need for more contextual studies [2], particularly the incorporation of concepts from the African context into the global literature. The entry is based on a traditional review of the extant literature sourced from reputable journal articles, websites, and databases.

2. Deviance

Deviance is the ‘voluntary behaviour that violates significant organisational norms and in so doing threatens the well-being of an organisation, its members, or both’ [3]. Eight different terms used to describe workplace deviance include noncompliant behaviour, workplace deviance, employee vice, organisational misbehaviour, workplace aggression, organisation-motivated aggression, organisational retaliation behaviour, and antisocial behaviour [4]. It is mostly used interchangeably as counterproductive work behaviour, which is seen as emotion-driven behaviours targeted at organisations to cause harm [4,5]. Organisational workplace deviance is enacted when deviant behaviours directly impact the organisation and can be displayed via theft, destruction, or misuse of property, while individual workplace deviance is targeted at individuals demonstrated by bullying, aggression, and the like [4]. It also causes reputational damages, endangers organisational members, defies the organisation and its norms, negatively impacts employees’ well-being, and causes financial losses [3,4].

Much of the workplace deviance literature suggests that deviance is not a favourable phenomenon and has been explained from varying lenses. For instance, in their qualitative review of the deviance literature for the past 18 years, Malik and colleagues [4] have performed extensive work in highlighting the key terms, theories, and behaviours prevalent in the literature, as shown in

Table 1. Overview of concepts in the deviance literature.

Types of Deviance	Individual	Situational
Production Deviance Theft, sabotage, withdrawal, cyber deviance, online banking, gambling, web porn, surfing, software piracy, hacking, cyberloafing.	Theories: stability to behaviours Trait activation theory. Reinforcement sensitivity theory.	Theories: Social influence: Identification-based: social identity theory. Self-categorisation theory.
	Factors: Dispositional personality: Low on honesty-humility dimensions. Low on good traits. Use disengaged coping styles.	Factors: individual: Bullying behaviours. Enabling and motivating structures. Climate/culture (collision of self-management and surveillance).
Political Deviance	Value system: Forming identity. Trait activation theory. Reinforcement sensitivity theory.	Cohesion theories Interdependence and bonding between group members. Relational cohesion theory. Interdependence theory.
	Perceptions and attitudes Strong justice values. High moral identity. Responding to injustice with retribution.	Team Group incivility. Peer intimidation. Team characteristics. Social norms.
Property Deviance	Appraisal of their environment Appraisal theory of options. Stress theory.	Information based theories Information that guides actions. Social cognitive theory. Social comparison theory.
Work Family Deviance	Theory of emotions Stress theory.	Supervisory factors Abusive supervision.
Personal Deviance Bullying, incivility Personal aggression Sexual harassment Verbal abuse Favouritism Gossiping	Control resources and regulate outcomes Self-regulation theory. Agency theory. Conservation of resources theory.	Exchange-based theories Influence of power and perceive justice over intergroup interaction Fairness theory. Power dependence theory.

below. Deviance is also classified as passive/active, planned or spontaneous, task or non-task, and skilled/unskilled deviant acts [4]. Additionally, Kacmar et al. [6] point to work–family deviance, which is about prioritising family over work. For example, talking to family members during work hours. This is somewhat like productivity deviance and other current trends like family incivility and work–life conflict [4]. Today, technology has made deviance even more difficult since it depersonalises deviant acts, making it easier to perform; in addition, cyberloafing could be seen subjectively by perpetrators or justified in a stressful workplace [4]. In essence, individuals are the key players or perpetrators of deviance, and such behaviours may have been observably rewarding or not punished in their enabling environment.

According to Achyldurdyyeva and colleagues [7], co-workers’ emotional expressions play a role in shaping or influencing colleagues’ behaviours at work. They found that a co-worker’s negative emotional expression has an indirect positive effect on interpersonal deviant behaviour when employees are less agreeable. In contrast, agreeableness and conscientiousness are negatively related to interpersonal and organisational deviance, respectively [8]. However, Cruz et al. [9] showed that employees with a positive relationship with their employer, lower psychological contract breach, and higher perceived organisational support are more deviant towards their co-workers whom they have a stronger relationship with. This could be due to the imbalance in power dynamics with their superiors or because their peers are more accessible [10]. There is also the tendency for involuntary stayers, with fewer alternatives to leave their organisation, to engage in deviant behaviours [11].

3. Deviant Phenomenon in an African Context

Work-chop (WC) is best described in pidgin—Nigeria’s informal lingua franca—as ‘Na where person dey work im dey chop’ [12]. It is a popular ideology that has been parroted or passed down by oral tradition in Nigeria. Literarily, the parroted statement mean one gains/eats or receives wages from one’s place of work. To unsuspecting foreigners, the notion that one earns (wages/salaries) from where one works is normal and not unethical. However, as Sambaris [12] rightly noted, the core tenet of WC is to receive the legal benefits attached to the job and ‘more’ using any means possible, be it illegal or unethical. Hence, while the reward for work performed is applaudable, the additional, unaccounted, or ill-gotten benefit is the crux of the matter.

In essence, the subtext or underlining meaning of work-chop is that one could gain more than the allocated resources or benefits via any means possible. This WC statement is often repeated to justify the perpetrators’ actions. It is much like the illusionary truth effect, where one repeats a particular idea, fake news, or lie to the point where it affects one’s belief or reality [13]. Work-chop is considerably accepted by many, especially when justified with propositions or assertions that are emotionally charged and economically beneficial in the face of an imploding economy. The current economic situation in Nigeria is very concerning, with cases of employees/civil servants not receiving paid salaries for months [14]. It makes economic sense for employees to engage in practices that will enable them to maximise benefits, but the unethicality of the adopted approaches is worth scrutinising.

Take the recent examples of e-hailing or offline trip techniques used by taxi drivers in some parts of Africa, where they solicit offline trips, negotiating a more favourable price with customers to avoid paying commission to Bolt at the risk of passengers in Abuja, Nigeria [15]. Reactively, Bolt suspends such drivers and has introduced an in-app facility to reduce such occurrences [16]. Albeit, these drivers offer a seemingly justifiable rationale for their actions, particularly blaming companies, such as Uber, Bolt, and Didi in South Africa, for the high commission they demand without changing the fares to meet the demands of surging fuel value and the struggling economy [17]. Indeed, these incidents call for a win–win approach where such transportation companies can offer more favourable terms. Yet, unethical means are not justifiable, so the somewhat acceptable notions of work-chop are similar to property deviance in the West.

The core difference, however, is that, unlike property deviance as defined in the Western literature, work chop is viewed as beneficial to the perpetrator. It is also perceived as considerable if victims (managers/employers and customers) fall prey to their schemes or organisations do not take adequate precautions to stop them. Sometimes, it is even pitched as a winning strategy to outsmart businesses or employers who are too trusting or have not offered what the employee deserves. Yet, from a meta-ethical realist perspective, the standard of rightness or wrongness is not dependent on a group’s redefinition or perception of a phenomenon [18]. Hence, it can be equally classified as deviance. However, if workplace deviance is a rule-breaking behaviour that is opposed to accepted norms or conventions within an organisation [4], an interesting question emerges as to the extent to which the WC phenomenon, an acceptable norm, can be viewed and classified as deviant or unethical behaviour. To answer this question, the next section unpacks the concept of ethics and workplace deviance as currently positioned in the extant literature.

4. Why WC Is Unethical

Ethics and deviance are related in terms of their evaluation of behaviours as right and wrong, where ethics emphasises the approach to right conduct and deviance exposes wrong conduct. With work-chop, the perpetrators do not view their behaviours or actions as unethical or deviant. Much like moral disengagement, they engage in the psychological process that allows them to evade responsibility or morally justify their actions and distort the consequences without self-sanctions [19]. Authors such as Malik and colleagues [4] argue that there may not always be objective measures for determining deviant behaviours. However, ethical theories are well-developed normative approaches that could enable one to decipher if actions or behaviours are morally justifiable. They hold no claims for justifying work-chop. For instance, work-chopping is neither a display of virtuous character nor the adoption of the right approach, so it can neither be classified as virtuous nor deontological [20].

From the consequential ethical standpoint, where the generally beneficial outcomes are justifiable [21], perpetrators seem to be the sole beneficiaries of the additional financial gain, often at the expense of a customer or their employers. At best, the work-chop phenomenon is an egoistic ideology that allows perpetrators to take actions based on self-interest [22]. Agreeably, in a world where the goal is the individual’s well-being, a claim to ethics could be premised on the notion that one ought to care for oneself. While that is good, the golden rule supposes that one’s care should not become detrimental to others. Even ethicists who hold to egoism suppose that individuals would largely behave or live in relation to others [22]. Hence, a question arising for the egoist is whether work-chop would work where everyone engages in it. Why would one’s self-interest infringe on another’s when the next person equally has a right to seek their self-interest and well-being? These pertinent questions call our attention to the chaos that can emanate from departing from a reasonable level of self-interest to the selfishness work-chop portrays.

The suggestion, therefore, is that a more mutually beneficial altruistic approach should be adopted where the relationship between employees/followers and customers/clients or employers/leaders is mutually beneficial [23]. To some extent, one can agree with Malik and others that the ‘challenge is that a single categorization system may not be suitable for all cultures or contexts’ [4]. Yet, there are objective moral values that defy cultural boundaries, or according to Langford [24], these first-order norms are universal, so are stable grounds upon which the foundational arguments are laid. Such universal principles from the field of moral philosophy include realism, a meta-ethical position that objective values are generally binding and external to the moral agent [25].

In moral psychology, the ethics of justice theory is a good example of this [26] as opposed to subjective paradigms such as care ethics [27]. Even subjectivists will be hard-pressed to support the work chop phenomenon as they still grapple with the start and end of individual rights in their pursuit of subjective values [28]. In essence, the underpinning ethical paradigm for this entry is the objective moral philosophy, which allows for an objective questioning of work-chop. Since work-chop ideals are opposed to objective morality, it is by nature deviant or unethical.

5. Work-Chop as Ethical Deviance

In response to the emerging question about the extent to which work-chop is deviant or not deviant, the prevalent Western perspective of deviance is ‘…the failure, deliberate or otherwise, of people to comply with the rules, standards or norms of any group, organization or society in which they are involved’ [29], suggests that behaviours which are culturally accepted, and thus the norm, are not positioned as deviant in the traditional sense despite the unethical actions it embodies. It does, however, highlight the interactionist notion of deviance [30] and the need to consider the social environment within which deviant behaviour (from a Western perspective) arises.

Here, the cultural cost of deviance requires a move away from examining individual behaviours and positioning the work-chop phenomenon as a cultural response to wider societal issues. For example, one must question whether it is intrinsically bad and needs to be fixed or if it is symptomatic of a broken system. A redefinition of deviance, bearing this unique context in mind, will be to position it as an orientation, action, or inaction that is opposed to universal ethical principles and standards of practice of a people or organisation. Most Nigerians consider work-chop as being unethical but are indifferent because of the societal conditioning surrounding the phenomenon. In Nigeria, as a collectivist society, group interest is prioritised such that the fear of retaliation, exclusion or victimisation deters some people from addressing such issues.

The notions of work-chop, which is viewed as deviant in other societies but considerable in Nigeria, prompt a further investigation of the phenomenon, especially the role played by individual vices and the environment. Owing to the undeniable presence of corruption in the world and its highlighted presence in developing nations of Africa [11], it may come as no surprise that such a phenomenon exists in Nigeria. It is noteworthy that work-chop as deviance is not a race-based, black-or-white issue but an issue of our flawed humanity. That is, any people group, including those with a creative personality, can morally disengage by acting unethically and justifying their decisions [19] because it is a phenomenon in the fallen human condition [31]. Here, the emphasis, therefore, is on the need for more ethical followers and leaders in Africa [32] and around the globe.

6. Parties Role in Enabling or Preventing WC

Leaders play a hugely influential role in their organisations and can impact their followers’ ethical or deviant behaviour. A leader’s behaviour serves as a salient contextual factor in the deviance literature. For example, Sawhney and colleagues [3] found that it explains a 32% variance in workplace deviance. This is especially so for passive and abusive behaviours [4,10]. As echoed by Liang and colleagues [33], even employees with organisational citizenship behaviours are more likely to engage in deviance when they have abusive leaders or supervisors who invade their privacy, blame, ridicule, or humiliate them. Nonetheless, as a collective behaviour, they want to participate in abusive/passive behaviours. Work-chop may be reduced if an alternative leadership philosophy, such as servant leadership principles [34], can be considered, where followers can be developed and motivated to serve others [35,36].

There is a plethora of leadership theories to choose from. This is because interest in the field of leadership has generally proliferated with the research and proposition of transformational, transactional, passive [37], ethical leadership [35], servant leadership [34,36], and authoritarian and entrepreneurial leadership theories [38], amongst others. Most scholarships in the African context are based on Western leadership styles due to the paucity of research on African leadership, which requires extensive research to uncover its antecedents, processes, and outcomes. African leadership is often characterised by hierarchy, community and ubuntu/humanness [39,40].

Africa is known to have produced several great leaders including Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Nelson Mandela, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf [41], and current thought leaders such as Prof. Patrick Lumumba. However, due to the institutionalisation of corruption in Africa, most leaders are described as corrupt or ineffective [42], glory-seeking, self-promoting, and narcissistic, qualities reflective of destructive leadership [43]. There, however, seems to be an inadequate focus on the role followers play. Logically, one can argue that if leaders were once followers, then followers become leaders. Similarly, if some of the current leaders are corrupt, they most likely were corrupt followers, had corrupt leaders or were enabled by the environment, so it will only be ambitious, at best, to expect good fruits from a bad tree.

According to the social learning theory [44], followers vicariously learn from their leaders or role models and replicate their observable behaviours. This means that leaders’ unethical behaviours can negatively impact followers, customers, and other stakeholders [45] and lead employees to commit crimes of obedience [46]. Indeed, followers are impacted by leadership, and the impact of bad leadership behaviours should not be underestimated. Given the role leaders play at work, it is safe to conclude that leaders’ abusive behaviours play a role in enacting deviant behaviours at work. However, should the blame only lie with the perpetrators of work-chop alone? The answer lies in the elements of Padilla and colleagues’ [47] toxic triangle, which shows how toxic or destructive leadership could create susceptible followers and thrive within an enabling environment. Indeed, leaders’ impact on followers as key recipients of leadership [46] is considerably more strongly portrayed in the literature, albeit followers are also influential. This is because they make sense of organisational processes by evaluating their leaders based on their experiences and perceptions of ideal characteristics of leadership.

Similarly, followers will be less inclined to use unethical measures when supervised by leaders perceived to be morally oriented [48]. For instance, ethical leaders who demonstrate normatively appropriate conduct can create ethical climates that oppose deviant practices [35]. Within the workplace deviance literature, deviance largely relates to control, and it can be functional in its approach. It may, therefore, be possible to consider work chop as a phenomenon that enables collective solidarity [49]. This highlights the role of leaders as major influencers of employee behaviour through social learning and social exchange, emphasising not only the alternative path to work-chop but also one to create the social, ethical desire to engage in and operationalise more ethical behaviours [50].

7. Conclusions

In the extant literature, which is mostly from Western settings, deviance is often seen as behaviours that are divergent, opposed to general norms and instituted authorities. However, work-chop deviance is more of a social norm that is parroted and acceptable as a norm and way via which perpetrators can maximise gain. The usual notions drawn from a Western context may not fully capture the unique perspective from other geographical spaces. Yet, regardless of context, it is widely agreed that deviance has negative outcomes on people and organisations. Hence, work-chop is discussed as an unethical norm requiring the use of proactive measures to enhance perpetrators’ moral development and realign onlookers’ perspectives. Instead of the parroted work chop ideology, an additional statement that supports ethical practices should be repeated instead. The entry adds a unique perspective to the deviance and leadership literature by showcasing that leaders who are simultaneously passive and abusive are deviant in themselves and can influence employees’ deviant behaviours. Servant leadership practices and other ethical approaches enabling leaders and followers to build healthy, trust-based working relationships are recommended.