Workplace deviance such as theft, lateness at work, drug abuse and abuse of co-workers, collectively costs organizations billions of dollars a year. But attempts to identify and explain the triggers of the problem have often been frustratingly inconclusive.

One key contributor is thought to be the employee’s level of self-esteem but the propositions behind this – for example, that someone with high self-esteem would be less likely to engage in deviant behavior, or someone with low self-esteem would be more likely to react to environmental stressors with deviance – have not been well supported. Now, though, new research offers a new line of investigation into the problem.

A study by D. Lance Ferris, Douglas J. Brown, Huiwen Lian and Lisa M Keeping argues that the previous results have been limited because the definition of “self-esteem” has been incomplete. They propose that self-esteem is not just a matter of high or low, but also tied to a context.

“Contingent self-esteem exists when one’s global sense of self-worth is staked to a particular domain, such as competence in the workplace, to the extent that one’s successes and failures in that domain determine one’s global self-worth,” they say.

“We argue that when an individual’s self-esteem is contingent on workplace competence, it has critical implications for understanding the relationship between self-esteem and deviant behavior.”

Those whose self-esteem is contingent on the workplace domain will be more likely to engage in self-imposed regulation of their behavior than those who are non-contingent.

“When one’s self-worth is contingent upon being competent in the work domain, one will seek to perform well as a means of demonstrating competence and avoid behaviors that would suggest incompetence. Deviant behaviors in this case would generate extreme feelings of shame and directly threaten the core of one’s self-worth.

“Critically, this would be the case of individuals with low or high self-esteem and we would not expect individuals with low self-esteem to engage in deviance.

“However, when one’s self-esteem is not staked to workplace competence, one is freed to engage in self-consistent behavior or to react negatively to role stressors without consequences for one’s self-worth. Contingent self-esteem thus moderates the effect of self-esteem on deviance.”

The authors show this to be the case in a multi-source survey of 123 employees recruited through advertisements. The employees responded to an initial survey then were assessed for self-esteem two weeks later and for deviant behaviors six months later. A significant other person in their life, such as their spouse or work peer, was asked to rate the extent to which employee’s self-esteem was contingent on workplace performance.

The results supported the contention that high levels of contingent self-esteem weakened the negative relationship between self-esteem and workplace deviance. However, tests on two related ideas – that role ambiguity and role conflict also played a role – were less conclusive. Role ambiguity was not found to be significant while there was preliminary support for role conflict which related most strongly to workplace deviance when both self-esteem and contingent self-esteem were low.

“Our results suggest that when workplace contingent self-esteem is low, global self-esteem relates to deviant behaviors,” the authors conclude.

Managers can respond by increasing workplace contingent self-esteem, although the authors concede this could be controversial and more research is required on the benefits and detriments of workplace contingent self-esteem.