Introduction

A diverse workforce has become a part of business organization (Kuklyte, 2018). Therefore, workplace includes an ample series of behaviors, which influence individuals and the company. Moreover, employee’s behavior at work determines whether the company succeeds or fails. Thus, the organization has to make sure that the employee behavior must be within the prescribed norms to achieve the desired objectives. But sometimes the behavior is not as prescribed in the norms and then it is called “deviant.” Deviant can be divided into two categories: constructive and destructive.

Constructive Deviant Behavior

Positive deviant which is also known as constructive deviant includes the deliberate infringement of organizational principles for the betterment of the business. Enhancing good deviant behavior in the workplace is critical because it allows employees to provide better solutions to problems than others in high-risk scenarios. Although it violates organizational policy, an employee’s positive deviant behavior aids the organization in achieving innovative results. Human resources who act on constructive deviant can add to the usefulness of their work, develop service, and enhance organizational performance (Mertens et al., 2016). Furthermore, the workforce concerned with constructive deviant can depict as active change agents who assist the business in altering to change and novel environmental restraints in the vivacious humankind marketplace (Robbins & Galperin, 2010). “Positive deviant behavior” must be creditable and focus on actions carried out with good intentions, regardless of the consequence. Positively deviant employees challenge the status quo to improve organizational systems’ effectiveness and efficiency (Mertens et al., 2016; Vadera et al., 2013), get a better answer to significant troubles with existing resources, and assist the organization in adapting to change and environmental restrictions (Mertens et al., 2016; Vadera et al., 2013).

Destructive Deviant Behavior

Negative deviant which is also known as destructive deviant includes the deliberate infringement of the organizational principles for the breakdown of the organization. “Negative deviant behavior” is an increasing topic of distress in enterprises worldwide; as such activities can be costly in the direction of their bottom line. Negative deviant entails damage, rumor spreading, business sabotage, or otherwise, unlawful organizational action that has adverse effects on the firm. Employee delinquencies such as not following the supervisor’s guidelines, knowingly slowing the work sequence, arriving behind schedule, doing the minor robberies, not regarding colleagues with respect, and acting ruthlessly with colleagues are instances of “negative deviant behaviors” (Robbins & Galperin, 2010). It is vital to distinguish between unethical activity and negative deviant behavior since the earlier includes engaging in a breach of society set of laws, and at the same time the second includes breach of primary corporate principles (Appelbaum et al., 2007).

To summarize, constructive deviant is proactive in nature and involves behaviors such as breaching organizational rules to develop a new product or ignore a supervisor’s instruction to assist a coworker. In conclusion, both productive and destructive deviants are linked in the organization (Robbins & Galperin, 2010). However, because the effects of both deviant actions are different, there is a narrow line between them. While destructive deviant is detrimental to the organization and its people, constructive deviation earns the organization praise. As a result, businesses must constantly explore strategies to reduce harmful deviant and increase positive deviant among their workforce.

However, empirical research was used to evaluate the proposed link; that is why this study uses a Bibliometric approach, which analyzes the literature on workplace deviant behavior articles. As a result, the research answers the subsequent research questions:

1. What is the contemporary publishing trend in workplace deviant behavior?
2. In terms of notable authors, countries, subject areas, journals, and organizations, who are the leading contributors to the creation of information and knowledge in this field?
3. What are the inherent linkages among the most commonly used author keywords that may reveal the conceptual structure of workplace deviant behavior?

The following sections make up the current article: introduction, concept origin, research methodology, final results, discussion, and conclusion. The results provide a complete analysis of the year of publication, publication sources, institution distribution, topic area as well as the shift in its structure.

Origin of Workplace Deviant

This section gives a quick overview of organizational deviant and its evolution over time, as well as the historical roots of the related idea of deviant behaviors. It was first interpreted by “Robinson and Bennett”, 1995 as “Voluntary behavior that breaches significant organizational norms and thereby undermines the functioning of an organization, its members, or both.” Vandalism, stealing, spreading gossip, sabotage, withdrawal, absenteeism, restraining effort, unethical decision-making process, abusive supervision, and negative feelings such as aggression or anxiety are examples of deviant behavior. There are different types of deviant behavior (see Table 1).

 

Table 1. Four Types of Deviant in a Workplace by Robinson and Bennett (1995).

 

Robinson and Bennett (1995) referred to the four classes of deviant behavior:

1. Production deviant is associated with wrongdoing such as leaving before time with no consent, endorsing or taking part in gambling on work grounds, transmission and wasting time by surfing the internet throughout job hours.
2. Property deviant is associated with wrongdoing such as acquiring office materials without consent, meddling, misrepresenting or faking of attendance card, and illicit employing company equipment.
3. Political deviant is associated with wrongdoing such as gossiping and spreading buzz.
4. Personal aggression is associated with wrongdoing like making hateful or awful statements regarding an employee and behaving impolitely with the boss.

Sometimes workplace deviant can also be for good cause and is beneficial for the organization. In this case, employee opts for creativity and innovation which is not prescribed in the organization’s norms. Positive deviant is described as any intentional violation of rules that benefits coworkers or an organization (Robbins & Galperin, 2010). Generally, it can be seen that constructively deviant employees have superior problem-solving techniques although they share identical resources and face challenges as the other workforce. Frequently, the main rationale for their accomplishment is basically that they complete things differently and even break rules and disobey processes to complete tasks quicker, at low cost, and way smarter (Uddin et al., 2017).

Positive workplace deviant is described as “deliberate behaviors that depart in honorable ways from the norms of a referent group” (Spreitzer & Sonenshein, 2004).

Three forms of constructive deviant behaviors have been identified and shown in Table 2.

 

Table 2. Three Types of Deviant in a Positive Workplace by Galperin (2002).

 

• The term “innovative organizational constructive deviant behavior” refers to new ideas and unconventional approaches to aid a company. These behaviors include looking for contemporary ways to complete daily actions and finding productive and ingenious solutions to difficulties.
• “Challenging organizational constructive deviant behavior” refers to acts that openly challenge the organization’s established norms and disobey the rules to benefit the organization. Breaking and bending the rules to complete a work, as well as violating company protocols to solve a customer’s problem, are examples of such behaviors.
• “Interpersonal constructive deviant behavior” comprises acts oriented to individuals, such as breach of rules or disclosing unlawful activity to colleagues.

Previous studies (Baharom et al., 2017) conducted a systematic review on workplace deviant aims to understand the dynamics of deviant workplace conduct and highlight the idea of deviant workplace behavior through a review of related prior research. The systematic analysis of leadership is the main emphasis of this study. This study supports the theoretical and empirical basis for transformational leadership’s moderating effect on the association between individual and deviant workplace behavior. The study also studied the cost associated with workplace deviant behavior. Moreover, to provide an insightful comprehension of the link between interpersonal and organizational deviant behavior and to assess the size and generalizability of relationships within their nomological networks, the study combined an exploratory meta-analytic approach with the horizontal contrasting method of theoretical elaboration. The findings showed a significant correlation between interpersonal and organizational deviant behavior.

Furthermore, Pletzer et al. (2020) conducted a meta-analysis of the associations between workplace deviant and all “Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience (HEXACO) domains and facets.” The findings of this study show that: (a) the “HEXACO” has modest to high-level criterion validity for workplace deviant behavior; (b) the slight aspect has higher criterion validity for workplace deviant behavior than the extensive area; (c) the “Honesty–Humility” domain masks different relationships connecting its side with the significantly stronger relationship of Fairness aspect with workplace deviant behavior than “Greed Avoidance and Modesty”; and (d) merely, the Fairness aspect is Together; the findings evince that HEXACO aspects can perform better in the prediction of Workplace deviant than broad domains.

Thus, after analyzing previous studies, it can be concluded that systematic and meta-analysis has been conducted on workplace deviant behavior. However, there is no bibliometric analysis undertaken on this topic. Thus, there arises a need to conduct a bibliometric analysis on the same. This research analyzes bibliometric factors for studies on workplace deviant behavior. It summarizes previous research works and makes the findings more visible. It highlights the gaps in the linked literature as well as the areas where future research should concentrate.

Research Methodology

The study used bibliometric analysis to examine workplace deviant behavior in the organization. The bibliometric (Günes et al., 2017) is an instrument for examining numeric and analytical methodologies as well as implicit information in scientific works. Under this analysis, statistical and mathematical tools are applied to books (Broadus, 1987). Bibliometric reviews are projected to be published in international journals, where the majority of study results will be quoted by other researchers in the future (Tibaná-Herrera et al., 2018). Moreover, it also provides an extensive variety of information, which allows researchers to get information about the trends in publishing on a certain topic (Esen et al., 2020) As a result, it was used in the research to gain a better knowledge of deviant in the organization.

Search Criteria

The research string adopted to search the articles was: TITLE-ABS-KEY (“Workplace Deviant Behavior”) OR (“Workplace Deviant Behaviour”) OR (“Workplace Incivility”) OR (“Counter Productive Work Behavior”) OR (“Destructive Deviant”) OR (“Constructive Deviant”) OR (“Organizational Deviant”) OR (“Positive Deviant”) OR (“Negative Deviant”).

Choosing a Database and Gathering of Data

The two main and most complete databases for large-scale bibliometric analyses and methods of research evaluation are WoS and Scopus (Pranckute, 2021). However, in social science research, Scopus database provides a comprehensive view of the articles (Pham-Duc et al., 2022). These data were collected from Scopus. The research yielded 1,336 publications in the Scopus database. But 357 papers (conference papers and book chapters are not included) from Scopus were selected because they were appropriate for the study. The details are provided in Figure 1.

 

Figure 1. Methodology Adopted to Extract the Documents for Analysis.

 

The following inclusion criteria were adopted:

• The research papers must be openly accessible.
• It must be Research Articles or Review Articles.
• It must be written in the English language.
• Keywords, titles, and abstracts must all include search terms.

The following exclusion criteria were adopted:

• Book chapters and conference proceedings were not included.
• Although one or more of these keywords were listed in the article’s keyword area, papers that do not explore or contain Workplace Deviant inside the paper.
• After evaluating the abstract and, in some circumstances, the whole text of the paper, the decision to exclude it was made.
• Papers not written in the English language were not included.

Data Quality

The Scopus database was employed to collect the data. Scopus has the most comprehensive abstract and citation database (Chadegani et al., 2013). Moreover, in the Social Sciences area, Scopus database provides wide-ranging documents. The year, subject area, author name, document type, keywords, nation, affiliation, and language are all included in the database. We narrowed our search for web accessibility studies by title to focus on the most relevant scholarly works in the field. As a result, quality data was obtained. Moreover, only review and research articles are included in the study because these articles are more rigorously peer-reviewed, thus it can maintain the data quality.

Data Analysis

Microsoft Excel and Vosviewer were used for data analysis. Division of articles based on year, subject wise, author wise, country wise and top 10 most cited publications were analyzed using MS Excel, and Tag clouds were created in Vosviewer to highlight the distribution of publications by country and the frequency of keywords in the articles.

Results

The analysis of content of the article provides more detailed information on the process. The bibliometric analysis techniques can be divided into two types as shown in Figure 2.

 

Figure 2. Overview of Analysis.

 

Performance Analysis

It analyses the contributions made by study participants to a certain field. The distinguishing feature of the bibliometric analysis is its descriptive nature. The results include an analysis of the year of publication, nations, journals, and citations of the selected articles. It includes the following.

Evolution of Publication

The number of relevant papers climbed slightly in 2010, but dramatically afterwards as shown in Figure 3. In 2019, it was expected that the number of publications would rise even further. Jones (1988) published first deviant study in 1988, titled “Random acts of kindness: A teaching tool for positive deviant.” But the study that the first introduced the term Workplace Deviant Behavior was “Development of a measure of workplace deviant” by Bennett and Robinson in the year 2000.

 

Figure 3. The Growth of Workplace Deviant Behavior Publications, 1997–2022.

 

Top 10 Most Cited Papers in the Scopus Database

Based on the Scopus database, Table 3 shows the top 10 most cited papers (based on the number of citations of the particular articles). The most cited document was Bennett and Robinson’s (2000) “Development of a measure of workplace deviant” as the concept of workplace deviant behavior was first coined by “Bennett and Robinson.”

 

Table 3. Top 10 Most Cited Papers in the Scopus Database.

 

Subject Analysis

The current document also organizes the articles according to their fields of study. Figure 4 represents the publications of workplace deviant behavior from different subjects. The majority of the publications are from the Social Sciences (13.6%) followed by Psychology (13%) and Business Management (12.6%). Table 4 represents the top subjects that are contributing in the workplace deviance behavior. The majority of the publications are from Medicine (164), followed by Social Sciences (81) and Psychology (77).

 

Figure 4. Subject Analysis.

 

Table 4. Top Subjects.

 

Source Analysis

Table 5 shows the most contributing journal in the workplace deviant behavior publication. Out of 42 journals, the study considers only the top 12 journals. The selection criteria include journals with at least four total publications.

 

Table 5. Most Contributing Journal.

Notes: TP = Total publications, TC = Total citation, CPP = Citation per publication.

 

Based on Table 5, Frontiers in Psychology, International Journal of Environment Research and Public Health and Food & Nutrition Bulletin are the top most journals in the field of workplace deviant behavior with TP 20, 14, and 11. Although Frontiers in Psychology tops with the highest number of publications, it did not get the top citations. However, the top cited publication with TC 138 is the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. As a result, the number of publications did not correspond to the number of citations.

Geographical Distribution of Publication

Table 6 shows a list of the top 15 countries contributing to workplace deviant behavior publications. The United States leads with 157 publications, followed by the United Kingdom (50), and Australia (29). Figure 5 depicts the countries who have published at least eight publications.

 

Table 6. Top 15 Countries Contributing to Workplace Deviant Behavior Publications.

 

Figure 5. Geographical Analysis.

 

The most engaged authors in publishing articles on workplace deviant behavior are also examined in this study. Figure 6 depicts the authors who have published at least four publications. Lawton, Foster and Baxter are top authors on the list with eight publications on workplace deviant behavior. The details of number of publications with the corresponding authors are provided in Table 7.

 

Table 7. Authorship Analysis.

 

Figure 6. Analysis of Authors.

 

Affiliation Analysis

Table 8 displays the top 10 institutions that made publications on workplace deviant behavior. Emory University is ranked first, followed by Oregon Health & Science University and Rollins School of Public health. Notably, publications on workplace deviant behavior may be found throughout the world, not only in one location which can be depicted in the table below. Figure 7 depicts the institutions who have published at least six publications.

 

Table 8. Top 10 Institutions Contributing Publications on Workplace Deviant Behavior.

 

Figure 7. Affiliation Analysis.

 

Science Mapping

It analyses the relationship between the components of a certain field. The approach focuses on the structural relationships and intellectual interactions between research components. It includes the following.

Keyword Analysis

When combined, keywords can even reveal the most popular study areas in a given field. A keyword analysis is conducted on the assumption that the keyword depicts the content of the research document. Vosviewer software was used to make keyword co-occurrence since it provides a strong graphical user interface (Cobo et al., 2011). Figure 8 shows keyword co-occurrence by selecting the occurrence of terms that appeared at least three times. Out of 2,571 keywords, 479 met the threshold represented by 3 clusters in different colors. The thickest node for workplace deviant behavior keywords belongs to cluster 1 which includes 84 items. The most utilized keywords include positive deviant, workplace, and incivility (see Table 9).

 

Figure 8. Keyword Analysis.

 

Table 9. Top Keywords.

 

Conclusion

The current research presents a bibliometric review to acquire a better knowledge of workplace deviant behavior. The goal is to obtain a better understanding and insight into current publishing patterns. An examination of workplace deviant behavior includes literature’s trends, forecasts, historical analysis, and contributions. The study examined 357 papers published in indexed journals in the Scopus database between 1997 and 2022 using bibliometric and descriptive approaches. Previous research on the subject began in 1997 and it has been steadily increasing since then. The number of publications increased in 2020 with a total of 58 publications against 41 publications in 2019. The increase in the publication shows the academic interest of the academician in the workplace deviant behavior topic. The geographical division of the literature depicts that the USA has the highest number of publications; thus, we propose that studies can be carried out in Asian nations such as Thailand, Malaysia, India, and Indonesia, taking into account the global impact of the fast-changing economic and political landscape.

The publication Bennett & Robinson in the year 2000, is the most cited document, first coined the term workplace deviant behavior. Later numerous studies have been conducted considering workplace deviant with employee well-being and leadership (Uddin et al., 2017) and performance (Porath et al., 2015) and organization culture (Di Stefano et al., 2019). These findings are similar to those of the current study, which emphasizes that workplace deviant behavior research is primarily associated with positive deviant, incivility, management and leadership according to the author’s keyword.

Thus, it can be concluded that this research will provide a deeper understanding of workplace deviant literature, as well as important insights and a more comprehensive picture of the topic from a bibliometric approach based on numerical data.

The database utilized is one of the recognized limitations of the study. Consequently, despite Scopus being the most comprehensive database, unindexed journals abound and should not be overlooked. Furthermore, only papers with the phrase “workplace deviant behavior” in the headline were examined for this study. Future research should broaden the scope of the search query to include other databases such as Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Dimensions. Integrating each of these datasets could lead to even more fascinating and valuable outcomes.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.