Discussion 1: Withdrawal Behaviors

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Human Performance

ISSN: 0895-9285 (Print) 1532-7043 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hhup20

Disentangling the Relationship Between Implicit
Aggressiveness and Counterproductive Work
Behaviors: The Role of Job Attitudes

Zvonimir Galić, Mitja Ružojčić, Željko Jerneić & Maša Tonković Grabovac

To cite this article: Zvonimir Galić, Mitja Ružojčić, Željko Jerneić & Maša Tonković Grabovac
(2018) Disentangling the Relationship Between Implicit Aggressiveness and Counterproductive
Work Behaviors: The Role of Job Attitudes, Human Performance, 31:2, 77-96, DOI:
10.1080/08959285.2018.1455686

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Disentangling the Relationship Between Implicit Aggressiveness
and Counterproductive Work Behaviors: The Role of Job Attitudes
Zvonimir Galića, Mitja Ružojčića, Željko Jerneića, and Maša Tonković Grabovacb

aDepartment of , Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia;
bDepartment of , University Department for Croatian Studies, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

ABSTRACT
Implicit aggressiveness, measured by the Conditional Reasoning Test for
Aggression (CRT-A), has been shown to be important for understanding
counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs). However, it is not clear how
employees justify CWBs that stem from their unconscious tendencies. We
tested the idea that implicitly aggressive individuals develop negative job
attitudes (JAs) to justify their CWBs. In Study 1, 333 employees completed
the CRT-A, a battery of JAs, and a CWBs scale. In Study 2, another sample
(n = 341) completed the CRT-A and different measures of JAs and CWBs. In
both studies, implicit aggressiveness explained JAs and self-reported CWBs.
Although the design did not allow establishment of exact causal sequence,
both studies were more consistent with the model where CWBs mediated
the CRT-A and JA relationship.

Counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs) consist of acts that harm or intend to harm other
employees or the employing organization (Spector et al., 2006). CWBs range from minor misbehavior,
such as wasting resources or gossiping about coworkers, to serious offenses, such as stealing from the
company or sexual harassment. The research on psychological determinants of CWBs has almost
exclusively relied on employees’ self-reports about their cognitions, attitudes, or behaviors related to
themselves or their working situation (e.g., Colbert, Mount, Harter, Witt, & Barrick, 2004; Douglas &
Martinko, 2001). However, recent developments in theory and research showed that CWBs and other
types of organizational behavior are, in addition to deliberate/conscious/explicit processes, influenced
by automatic/unconscious/implicit processes (George, 2009; Uhlmann et al., 2012).

Although the relationship between conscious or explicit cognitions and CWBs has been well researched
and summarized in a number of meta-analyses (e.g., Berry, Ones, & Sackett, 2007; Hershcovis et al., 2007),
until recently the relationship between implicit psychological processes and CWBs remained mostly
unexplored. Recently, a number of assessment methods that reliably and validly measure aspects of implicit
personality have been introduced (Uhlmann et al., 2012). One of the most prominent among them is the
Conditional Reasoning Test for Aggression (CRT-A), which captures implicit aggressiveness and was
shown to be important for understanding and predicting CWBs (Berry, Sackett, & Tobares, 2010; James &
LeBreton, 2012). Although the CRT-A is important for understanding CWBs, it is still not clear how
implicit aggressiveness as measured with the CRT-A fits into theoretical models that assume that CWBs
should be closely related to the quality of social exchange between the employee and his or her employer
(Cropanzano & Mitchell, 2005). Most puzzling seems to be the question how implicitly aggressive
individuals justify their engagement in deliberate CWBs that result from aggressive inclinations of which
they are not aware (i.e., those that stem from their implicit personality).

CONTACT Zvonimir Galić [email protected] Department of , Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University
of Zagreb, Zagreb, Luciceva 3, 10 000 Zagreb, Croatia.

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.
© 2018 Taylor & Francis

HUMAN PERFORMANCE
2018, VOL. 31, NO. 2, 77–96
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In this article, we report the results of two studies that explored the relationship among implicit
aggressiveness as measured with the CRT-A, job attitudes, and CWBs. Before describing our study in
more detail, we briefly review the logic behind the CRT-A, describe the validity studies that revealed
its importance for understanding and predicting CWBs, and endeavor to explain the role of job
attitudes in the relationship between implicit aggressiveness and CWBs.

The CRT-A and CWBs

The conditional reasoning approach to implicit aggressiveness measurement (James & LeBreton,
2012) follows from the idea that individuals’ reasoning is conditional on their personality and that
insight into how individuals reason helps us determine their aggressiveness level. More specifically,
James and LeBreton (2010, 2012) proposed that aggressive individuals use specific motive-based
cognitive biases to reconcile their recurrent need to hurt others with the universal need to maintain
positive self-regard. Because these biases are largely unconscious, they are considered to be part of
implicit personality. For example, among the biases that characterize implicitly aggressive indivi-
duals, James and LeBreton (2012) listed derogation of target bias and victimization by powerful others
bias. Aggressive individuals are inclined to see the targets of their aggression as evil, immoral, and
untrustworthy (derogation of target bias) and perceive themselves as victims of exploitation by
powerful others, such as supervisors, managers, or community leaders (victimization by powerful
others bias). These biases help aggressive individuals see their aggressive acts as reasonable responses
to the social situations they encounter.

Conditional reasoning researchers measure implicit aggressiveness by capturing these uncon-
scious biases through performance on the CRT-A (James & McIntyre, 2000). The CRT-A is an
innovative measurement instrument that is used to identify implicitly aggressive individuals by
observing their performance on a set of inductive reasoning tasks in which respondents are asked
to give the most logical conclusion following from a story described in the item stem. These
ostensibly logical analyses of various situations reveal the existence of the biases typical of aggressive
individuals, and the frequency of their occurrence in an individual’s reasoning represents an
indicator of the individual’s aggressiveness level (James & LeBreton, 2012).

Meta-analytical estimates of the validity of CRT-A scores in predicting CWBs differed between
sources: .44 in James et al. (2005); .16 in Berry et al. (2010); .08 in Banks, Kepes, and McDaniel
(2012); and .27 in James and LeBreton (2012). However, even the authors of one of the less favorable
meta-analyses agreed that “CRT-Aggression scales appear to have potential to be a useful new
approach to the prediction of CWBs and are deserving of further research” (Berry et al., 2010, pp.
379–380).

Relationship among implicit aggressiveness, job attitudes, and CWBs

There seems to be convincing evidence that implicit aggressiveness, as measured with the CRT-A,
predicts CWBs. At the same time, similar to other implicit personality measures, such as the
Thematic Apperception Test (McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1989) or Implicit Association
Test–based measures (Schnabel, Asendorpf, & Greenwald, 2008), CRT-A scores are almost comple-
tely independent from personality traits as measured with personality questionnaires (i.e., explicit
personality). Several studies have shown that CRT-A scores are weakly or even nonsignificantly
correlated with self-reported aggressiveness (James & LeBreton, 2012). Moreover, Galić (2016)
recently showed that the relationship between the CRT-A and CWBs cannot be explained with
the test’s overlap with the Dark Triad traits, the honesty/humility trait from the HEXACO, or the
trait self-control, all important CWB predictors in the personality domain. That means that
implicitly aggressive individuals do not engage in aggressive acts toward their employing organiza-
tion or its members (i.e., CWBs; Spector et al., 2006) simply because they act consistent with their

78 Z. GALIĆ ET AL.

self-concept captured with personality questionnaires. Here, some other psychological processes
should also come into the play.

We propose that, to justify their CWBs, implicitly aggressive employees must develop negative
attitudes about their relationship with the employer. Our explanations rest on social exchange theory
(Cropanzano, Anthony, Daniels, & Hall, 2017; Cropanzano & Mitchell, 2005) According to that
theory, the relationship between an employee and an employer is a social exchange that includes
initiating actions, an estimate of the quality of social exchange and reciprocating responses. The
main rule of social exchanges is the reciprocity norm that is considered a universally accepted
principle (Gouldner, 1960), and negative reciprocity (i.e., the idea that people should reciprocate
with retaliatory behavior to those who treated them badly) should explain the occurrence of CWBs.

Hence, unfavorable job attitudes should explain how an employee can balance CWBs that stem
from his or her unconscious aggressive inclinations and satisfaction of the reciprocity norm.
However, the exact causal sequence in the relationship among implicit personality, job attitudes,
and CWBs is uncertain. On one hand, implicit personality might influence job attitudes that in turn
determine organizational behavior (i.e., CWBs). It could be argued that unconscious cognitive biases
of aggressive individuals influence job attitude formation through cognitive processes, such as
selective attention, confirmatory biases, and causal inferences (James & LeBreton, 2012). When
developed, negative attitudes then influence subsequent CWBs. Earlier research on the relationship
among explicit personality, job attitudes, and CWBs took this theoretical position. For example,
Crede, Chernyshenko, Stark, Dalal, and Bashshur (2007) showed that job satisfaction partially
mediated the relation between positive emotionality and negative emotionality with CWBs.
Similarly, Mount, Ilies, and Johnson (2006) reported that job satisfaction partially explained the
relationship between agreeableness and CWBs. Recently, Guay et al. (2016) demonstrated that
organizational commitment mediates the relationship between conscientiousness and CWBs direc-
ted toward organization and the relationship between agreeableness and CWBs directed toward
coworkers.

On the other hand, literature in social psychology on attitudes development and implicit/auto-
matic psychological processes suggests that an alternative sequence where behavior antecedes
attitudes is also possible. More precisely, research on the self-perception theory (Bem, 1972) suggests
that people use their behavior as the major source of self-knowledge, and the cognitive dissonance
literature (Festinger, 1957) reports that individuals change their attitudes to align them with their
behavior. In our case, this would mean that negative attitudes toward their job and relationship with
the organization might be post hoc rationalizations developed by employees who have already
engaged in CWBs. Considering that some authors suggest that automatic psychological processes
lead to behavior without a prior conscious choice (e.g., Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Becker,
Cropanzano, & Sanfey, 2011; McClelland et al., 1989; Strack & Deutsch, 2004), this causal sequence
might be even more plausible in the case of the relationship among implicit aggressiveness, job
attitudes, and CWBs. In our study, we juxtaposed the two possible causal sequences on two data sets.

Our research

Little is known about psychological mechanisms through which implicit personality influences work
behavior. Our research intended to add to the literature by further exploring the relationship of
implicit personality with CWBs and job attitudes. Moreover, we sought to explain how implicitly
aggressive individuals can engage in CWBs and still satisfy the reciprocity norm that lies in the core
of social exchange theory.

In this article, we analyzed the relationship among implicit aggressiveness, CWBs, and job
attitudes that were most often listed as reasons for CWBs. We selected three sets of job attitudes
that should best reflect global employees’ perceptions about their relationship with the employer and
might be influenced by employees’ implicit aggressiveness: justice perceptions, general quality of the
social exchange between the individual and the employer, and job satisfaction. In both our studies,

HUMAN PERFORMANCE 79

we sought to control for the part of variance that implicit aggressiveness, job attitudes, and CWBs
share with explicit personality (in Study 1 we controlled for positive and negative affect, and in Study
2 for aggressiveness self-reports). We advanced the following hypotheses:

H1: Implicit aggressiveness will be positively related to CWBs, over and above explicit personality.

H2: Implicit aggressiveness will be negatively related to job attitudes, over and above explicit personality.

In addition, we formulated two alternative research hypotheses (Leavitt, Mitchell, & Peterson,
2010; Platt, 1964) concerning the relationship among implicit aggressiveness, job attitudes, and
CWBs. The first hypothesis follows from the research that explored the relationship among explicit
personality, attitudes, and CWBs (e.g., Crede et al., 2007; Guay et al., 2016; Mount et al., 2006):

H3a: Job attitudes will partially mediate the relationship between implicit aggressiveness and CWBs.

However, the large literature on attitude formation (Bem, 1972; Festinger, 1957) and automatic/
implicit processes from social psychology and personality literature (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999;
McClelland et al., 1989; Strack & Deutsch, 2004) suggests the following alternative hypothesis:

H3b: CWBs will partially mediate the relationship between implicit aggressiveness and job attitudes.

The alternative research models described in the hypotheses are shown in Figures 1 and 2. In both
cases, we expected partial and not full mediation because our models did not include some other
variables that could explain the relationship between the implicit aggressiveness and CWBs or
implicit aggressiveness and job attitudes (e.g., workplace affect; Spector, 2011).

We performed two studies that tested the research models. In these two studies, we tested our
hypotheses using alternative operationalizations of the job attitudes and CWBs.

Study 1

In the first study, we used a well-known CWBs measure that captures interpersonal and organiza-
tional deviance behaviors (Bennett & Robinson, 2000). As a set of job attitudes that could be
important for implicit aggressiveness and CWBs, we selected overall justice judgments,

Implicit

aggressiveness
Job attitudes

Counterproductive

work behaviors

Figure 1. Job attitudes as the mediators between implicit aggressiveness and counterproductive work behaviors.

Implicit

aggressiveness

Counterproductive

work behaviors
Job attitudes

Figure 2. Counterproductive work behaviors as the mediator between implicit aggressiveness and job attitudes.

80 Z. GALIĆ ET AL.

organizational cynicism, and general job satisfaction. We related both sets of constructs (i.e., CWBs
and job attitudes) to implicit aggressiveness measured with the CRT-A and explicit personality
captured with positive and negative trait affect scales because those two affectivity traits were shown
to be important for both job attitudes and CWBs (e.g., Connolly & Viswesvaran, 2000; Hershcovis
et al., 2007).

Many researchers see injustice perceptions as one of the most important reasons for engaging in
CWBs (Berry et al., 2007; Cohen-Charash & Spector, 2001) and even postulate that employees
engage in CWBs mainly to restore equity or fairness in the relationship with the employing
organization. In this study, we focused on overall justice judgments (Ambrose & Schminke, 2009),
a general sense of justice in one’s job. Organizational cynicism was used as the indicator of general
quality of social exchange between an individual and his or her organization. Organizational
cynicism is defined as “an employee’s negative attitude toward their organization as a whole and
belief that the organization lacks integrity” (Chiaburu, Peng, Oh, Banks, & Lomeli, 2013, p. 189).
Finally, job satisfaction represents a general evaluation of one’s job and central job attitude (Judge &
Klinger, 2007), which was shown to be an important correlate of different types of organizational
behavior, including CWBs (Crede et al., 2007; Mount et al., 2006).

Method

Procedure and participants
Participants were recruited by undergraduate psychology students (around 20 participants per
student) who received extra course credit for their engagement. The only criteria for participants’
inclusion were that they had been employed at their current organization for at least 6 months and
worked at least 20 hr per week. The students visited the participants—who were their relatives,
friends, or acquaintances—in their homes, gave them a survey package, and instructed them to
respond to the test battery honestly, without giving any information about their identity. After they
completed the package, they were asked to place all the questionnaires in an envelope, seal it, and
return it to the students, who then brought them to the head researcher. The students were
instructed to supervise participants to ensure that they completed the CRT-A within the 25-min
time limit, under the instruction that they were solving a reasoning test. Neither the student-
collaborators nor the participants were aware of the CRT-A’s measurement object at the time of
the data collection.

In total, 353 employees from various organizations participated in the study. Twenty participants
(5.7%) had five or more illogical responses on the CRT-A and were, in accordance with the test
manual (James & McIntyre, 2000), excluded from further analyses. Thus, our analyses were based on
333 participants. The average age of the participants was 41.78 years (SD = 10.71), and 61% of the
participants were female. Their average tenure was 18.31 years (SD = 10.87). Regarding educational
level, 46.8% of the participants were high school graduates, 12.3% were college graduates, and 39.3%
had a university or graduate degree.

Instruments
CRT-A. The CRT-A consists of 25 inductive reasoning problems, 22 of which are conditional
reasoning problems designed to reveal the presence of the justification mechanisms associated
with aggression in a respondent’s reasoning (James & LeBreton, 2010, 2012; James & McIntyre,
2000). Each of these 22 problems has an item stem with a story designed to trigger the activation
of justification mechanisms that rationalize aggressive behavior and four response options: an
inductively logical aggressive response, an inductively logical response based on socially adaptive
ideology and reasoning, and two illogical responses. Respondents are asked to find the most
logical explanation for the information presented in the problem’s stem. Three of the test
problems are “classic” inductive-reasoning problems with one right answer and are included in
the test to enhance its face validity as a reasoning test. The Croatian adaptation of the test was

HUMAN PERFORMANCE 81

created after a careful adaptation process and was extensively validated to prove that it had
similar psychometric characteristics to the original (Galić, Scherer, & LeBreton, 2014). The
internal consistency of the CRT-A in this study was .73.1

Explicit personality. We measured positive and negative affect with the International Positive and
Negative Affect Schedule Short Form (Thompson, 2007), which consists of adjectives reflecting
various moods. The task of the participants was to assess how they generally feel using a scale from
1 (very slightly or not at all) to 5 (extremely). Positive affect (PA) was measured with five items (e.g.,
“active,” “inspired”) and had an alpha reliability of .77. Negative affect (NA) was also measured with
five items (e.g., “nervous,” “hostile”) and had a reliability of .78.

Job attitudes. Overall justice judgments were measured with the six-item Perceived Overall Justice
Scale (Ambrose & Schminke, 2009). Sample items were “Overall, I’m treated fairly by my organiza-
tion” and “Usually, the way things work in this organization are not fair” (reverse scored).
Organizational cynicism was measured with four items capturing cognitive dimensions of organiza-
tional cynicism taken from Brandes, Dharwadkar, and Dean (1999), a scale that is considered to be a
“representative measure of organizational cynicism” (Chiaburu et al., 2013, p. 186). Sample items
included “My organization’s policies, goals, and practices seem to have little in common” and “My
organization expects one thing of its employees, but rewards another.” For both scales, responses
were given on a 7-point scale from 1 (completely disagree) to 7 (completely agree). The internal
consistencies of overall justice judgments and organizational cynicism scales were .90 and .89,
respectively. Finally, job satisfaction was measured with the three items proposed by Judge and
Klinger (2007): “All things considered, are you satisfied with your present job?” (response options
were “yes” and “no”), “How satisfied are you with your job in general?” (possible responses ranged
from 1 [very dissatisfied] to 5 [very satisfied]), and “Please write down your best estimate of the
percentage of time you feel satisfied about your present job on average” (response: percentage of
time at work feeling satisfied). The internal consistency of the total score calculated as a mean of
standardized responses to the three questions was .90.

Counterproductive work behaviors. CWBs were measured with the scale developed by Bennett and
Robinson (2000). The task of participants was to self-report the occurrence of listed CWBs during
the last year on a 7-point scale where 1 = never, and 7 = once a day. The seven interpersonal
deviance items reflected CWBs targeted toward other individuals in the organization where the
participants worked (sample items: “Made fun of someone at work,” “Acted rudely toward someone
at work”), whereas the 12 organization deviance items measured CWBs directed toward the
organization (sample items: “Took property from work without permission”, “Put little effort into
your work”). Because we did not expect that implicit aggressiveness would be differently related to
interpersonal deviance/organization deviance factors and because recent theoretical work (Marcus,
Taylor, Hastings, Sturm, & Weigelt, 2016) postulates a general CWB factor, we calculated the total
score on the scale (Cronbach’s α = .84).

All the self-report instruments used throughout this article were translated to Croatian following
the translation-back translation procedure.

Given that explicit personality, job attitudes and CWBs were all measured with self-reports, we
conducted confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) using maximum likelihood estimation to check if
common measurement method undermined the construct validity of used measures. The results of
CFA showed that the model specifying separate factor for each of the measured constructs fitted data
significantly better, χ2(804) = 1659.99, p < .01, comparative fit index (CFI) = .83, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = .06, than the model in which all items loaded on a single factor, χ2(819) = 3638.65, p < .01, CFI = .45, RMSEA = .11; Δχ2(15) = 1978.7, p < .01, or the three-factor model in which explicit personality, job attitudes, and CWB items loaded on three separate factors, χ2(816) = 2613.03, p < .01, CFI = .65, RMSEA = .09; Δχ2(12) = 953.04, p < .01. 82 Z. GALIĆ ET AL. Results Descriptive statistics of the study’s variables are presented in Table 1. The CRT-A score correlated positively with CWBs (r = .31, p < .01) and had significant correlations with all three job attitudes. In accordance with our expectations, it was negatively correlated with overall justice judgment (r = −.25, p < .01) and job satisfaction (r = −.16, p < .01) and positively related to organizational cynicism (r = .22, p < .01). At the same time, the CRT-A score was almost independent from the demographic variables, PA and NA. It was significantly correlated only with age (r = −.11, p = .05), however, that correlation was well below its relationships with job attitudes and CWBs. Finally, CWBs correlated significantly with all three job attitudes. Higher levels of CWBs were correlated with lower scores on overall justice (r = −.27, p < .01) and job satisfaction (r = −.25, p < .01), and higher scores on organizational cynicism (r = .28, p < .01). To test H1 (relationship between implicit aggressiveness and CWBs controlled for explicit personality), we conducted a hierarchical regression analysis in which the CWB score was a criterion variable. As seen in Table 2, PA (β = −.14, p = .01) and NA (β = .17, p < .01) were significant predictors of CWBs and the CRT-A entered in the model in Step 2 explained CWBs over and above PA and NA (ΔR2 = .09, β = .30, p < .01). Therefore, H1 was supported. To test H2 (regarding the relationship between the CRT-A and job attitudes), we performed three hierarchical regression analyses, one for each job attitude. In each of the analyses, the PA and NA were entered in the first step and the CRT-A scores in the second step. The results shown in Table 3 indicate that H2 was fully supported. The CRT-A added to the explanations of overall justice judgments (ΔR2 = .04, β = −.20, p < .01), organizational cynicism (ΔR2 = .04, β = .19, p < .01), and job satisfaction (ΔR2 = .02, β = −.13, p = .013) over and above PA and NA. Notably, except for the relationship of PA with organizational cynicism, PA and NA significantly predicted all job attitudes, and their beta coefficients remained mostly unchanged once the CRT-A score was entered into the equation. Finally, to compare different causal sequences of the relationship of the CRT-A with job attitudes and CWBs, we conducted mediation analyses using Process (version 2.16.3) for SPSS (Hayes, 2013). Following recommendations of Wen and Fan (2015), alongside unstandardized indirect effects, in both studies we report standardized indirect effects and the ratio of the indirect effect to the total effect. In the first set of analyses, we tested the research model in which job attitudes served as the mediators in the relationship between implicit aggressiveness and CWBs (H3a). We performed three analyses in which each of the job attitudes served as the mediator. We conducted separate analyses for each of the attitudes because in the literature they are usually considered as separate determinants of CWBs. As seen in Table 4, all the indirect effects of the CRT-A on CWBs through job attitudes were significant (i.e., the …