Counterproductive Work Behavior
46
(e.g., never complains about the organization to coworkers, always participates in events
organized by the company), producing a total of 24 behaviors for each performance component.
A total of 90 students enrolled in an Executive MBA program at a university in the
Zhejiang province of China volunteered to complete the survey. This sample of managers is
independent of the two samples that participated in Study 1. A total of 19 questionnaires were
excluded from the data analysis. These questionnaires were either completed by people who had
no prior experience rating administrative assistants or did not complete the questionnaires
correctly. Eighty percent of the participants were male. The participants were on average 29 years
old (SD = 2.21), had 17 years of formal education (SD = 1.35), and had worked at their current
jobs for 3.3 years (SD = 2.08). A total of 67% of the respondents were managers and 26% were
professionals. Fifty-two percent of the respondents worked for state-owned enterprises, 25% for
foreign enterprises, 13% for joint ventures, and the rest for private organizations. Approximately
50% of the respondents worked in Shanghai and Jiangsu province, and the rest worked in 15
different provinces.
In the survey, the managers were provided with the definition of each performance
component, asked to read each behavioral statement, and rate the level of performance it
reflected using a seven-point Likert scale (e.g., the Likert scale for task performance was
anchored by 1 = low task performance and 7 = high task performance). Item level statistics were
computed for each behavior. The item had to satisfy three criteria in order to be selected for use
in the final survey. First, any item with a standard deviation larger than 1.5 was eliminated
(Landy, Rastegary, Thayer, & Colvin, 1991). Second, the aggregate mean and variance for the
final set of behaviors had to be similar across performance components. Third, the performance
components had to be approximately normally distributed. Items were eliminated until these