Counterproductive Work Behavior
13
task. The participants were 47% male, had an average age of 33 years (SD = 3.67), had on
average 9.15 (SD = 3.25) years of full-time work experience and 4.19 (SD = 2.47) years
experience as a manager. They had worked for various types of Chinese organizations: 40% of
the participants worked for state-owned enterprises, 27% for foreign enterprises, 17% for joint
ventures, and the rest for private firms.
Procedure for Step 2:
Participants were invited to participate in this step on a voluntary basis. Participants were
presented with a set of instructions in which they were asked to sort the 66 CWB incidents into
different categories based on the similarity of the behaviors. The participants were not given any
category labels. The CWB incidents were written on cards in Chinese, and Chinese was the
participants' native language. The participants were instructed to read each behavior carefully
and to place it into the category that they believe it belongs to based on the similarity of the
behaviors. The instructions stated that they would likely create anywhere from 5 to 12 categories.
This range was chosen based on a review of prior studies that used a similar procedure and a
review of the CWB literature (e.g., Borman & Brush, 1993). After each participant completed the
sorting task, a research assistant recorded the number of categories that each participant used to
sort the CWB incidents and which items were placed in each category. This information served
as the basis for the analyses.
We analyzed these data using multidimensional scaling (MDS). MDS is a useful
technique for representing the underlying structure of objects/stimuli from information about the
similarity/dissimilarity among the objects (Schiffman, Reynolds, & Young, 1981). We followed
the procedure recommended by Schiffman, et al. (1981). The researcher presents the participant
with the full set of objects/stimuli and asks the participant to sort them into groups based on their