How to prevent Incivility and Organizational Workplace Deviance? The moderating role of Negative Reciprocity and Conscientiousness.

The present work focuses on the effect of gender differences and the norm of reciprocity in Counterproductive Workplace Behaviors (CWBs). More in detail, we analyzed the link between psychological contract breach, incivility, and Organizational Workplace Deviance (WD-O). We hypothesize that incivility mediates the relationship between psychological contract breach and WD-O. We also suppose the presence of two moderation effects. The first one refers to negative reciprocity belief on the relationship between psychological contract breach and incivility; the second one considers the effect of conscientiousness on the relationship between incivility and psychological contract breach. The hypotheses are tested on a sample of 330 employees working in four Italian organizations. To better understand the mechanisms that underlie examined organizational phenomena, we split our sample between men and women, considering, in this way, gender differences in reciprocity attitudes. Structural equation modeling confirms our hypothesis just on the women’s sample. Implications and limitations are discussed.