Productive and Counterproductive Behavior

Productive and Counterproductive Behavior in Organizations
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PSY/428
August 24, 2011



Productive and Counterproductive Behavior in Organizations
The behaviors of employees in an organization are known as productive and counterproductive, these behaviors can benefit an organization or they can have a negative impact.   There has been a lot of Psychological research done that examines these behaviors in an attempt to enhance job performance.   This paper attempts to define both the counterproductive behaviors that can be detrimental to an organization and the productive employee behaviors that enhance an organization.  
Productive Behavior and its impact on an organization
Productive behavior is defined as employee behavior that contributes positively to the goals and objectives of the organization displayed from their employees (Jex & Britt, 2008).   Three of the more common forms of productive employee behaviors are job performance, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and innovation.   Job performance in generic terms covers all of the behaviors that employees engage in while on the job (Jex & Britt, 2008).   This unfortunately is not very accurate because employees often engage in behaviors that have little to do with the job task the employees are performing.   Job performance may be better described as not only how well an employee performs a job task, but also includes other forms of productive behavior.   Over time the research has concluded that three variables can be pointed to as predictors of job performance.   One is general cognitive ability.   The second one is level of job experience and lastly there is the personality trait of conscientiousness (Jex & Britt, 2008).
Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) is another form of productive behavior.   Generally speaking, OCB refers to those behaviors that are not a part of an employees’ formal job description or behaviors for which employees are not formally rewarded (Jex & Britt, 2008)....