Counterproductive and Productive Behavior in Organization Productive

Counterproductive and Productive Behavior in Organization

Productive and Counterproductive Behaviors Paper

In today's organizations, employees are meant to work effectively by utilizing the resource available in an organization efficiently in order to attain optimum productivity of labor. It is expected by the management that the employees should exhibit productive behaviors in essence contributing towards and organization's goal of optimality and objective targeting (Nathan & Gary, 2010). It appreciated that, absence of productive behavior within an organization result to adverse effects in operations and performance (Diego & Rizzi, 2010).

Definition of Productive and Counterproductive behaviors

Productive behaviors within an organization are the behaviors exhibited by employees that contribute positively towards achieving organizational objectives and goals (Britt & Jex, 2008). Productive behaviors are those that attend to employees' positive contribution to the organizational needs and set objectives. The positive productive behaviors are expected to increase an employee's productivity and thus contribute to the overall organizational productivity. Productive behaviors give a rating that identifies the employees who work competently for the organization through their inherent self-motivation measure (Taomina, 2009). Productive behavior can breads three distinct aspects; job performance, innovation and organizational citizenship (Feather & Rauter, 2004).

These behaviors are thought to deplete the positive effects that productive behaviors tend to bread within the organization. They are intentional behaviors exhibited by individual employees with an organization contrary to an organization's interest or aspirations (Britt & Jex, 2008). The counterproductive behaviors consist of production-based and property deviance that is in violation of the explicit and implicit generally accepted standards of work place behavior. These include; lateness in reporting to work, leave work early, drug abuse, sexual harassment, absenteeism from work, theft of organization property and misrepresentation of expenditures in reports among others (Nathan & Gary, 2010). This behaviors are seen to serve the immediate needs of an individual employees but ultimately contribute to negative productivity of the individual employee or/and of other employees. This ultimately destroys the interest of the organization, and its capacity to attain set goal is compromised (Bowling & Hammond, 2008).

Impact of productive and counterproductive behaviors on job performance and overall organization performance

Productive behaviors eliminate counter-productive behaviors while vice versa is true counter-productive behaviors eliminate productive behaviors. Productive behaviors are attributes that are encouraged within an organization as far as the needs and goals of the organization are to be met. Productive behavior will lead to employee motivation in task performance that target efficiency and improvement in the task performance. This means that the organization will be able to harness motivated employees and increase their potential in meeting their targets. An individual employee motivation towards improving their task performance will be reflected upon other employees who will seek similar capability to improve themselves. This form of positive impact will lead to improvements in task performance and overall productivity of the organization. On the contrary, counter-productive behaviors will work to discredit individual output thus reducing the cohesive potential of employees to improve in their task performance. The overall organization performance will be pulled backwards. Employee motivation in this case is likely to be low since the efforts of some employees are not reflective of other employees' efforts (Bowling & Hammond, 2008).

The productive behaviors of the organization are expected to lift up the potential of the organization to grow in the industry through building a strong brand. The productive behavior of the employees is likely to be reflected in the productivity of the organization and the motivation of employees within and outside the organization. This in effect will build a strong brand name for the organization and contribute to effective marketing of the products or services of the organization. Adversely, counterproductive behaviors reduce productivity and the potential employees motivation thus the organization's brand name performance in the market is dismal (Feather & Rauter, 2004).

The organization's performance is reliant on employee's behaviors. In order to optimize resource utilization and maximize output for the increased value to stakeholders' productive behaviors must be harnessed. However, if organization employees engage in counter-productive activities and behavior, the organization will lose its value, leading to poor performance. It is therefore contended that to ascertain performance of an organization the behaviors of its employees need to reflect positive behaviors (Britt & Jex, 2008).

Job performance amidst employees can well be stirred by productive and counter-productive behaviors. An employee with productive behavior can easily promote fellowship from other employees thereby, creating cohesiveness in work performance. This increases labor productivity and ultimately better quality of products and/or services by the organization (Britt & Jex, 2008). In this case productive work performance may encourage competiveness and assimilation in work performance. The aspect of competition is natural to human beings and where an organization harnesses it, it can lead to productivity and overall organization growth. The harnessing of the productive behavior can be through, promotions, gift and salary increment's in accordance to task performance. Contrary to this, counterproductive employees will frustrate or interrupt productive employees thus, negatively impacting individual and the general performance within the organization (Diego & Rizzi, 2010).

Strategies to increase productivity

In order to attain optimal productivity of the organization and ensure maximization of resources within the organization it is important to understand deeply employee counter-productive and productive behaviors. To increase productivity, manager ought to identify the likely differences among the employees and reorient these differences towards building a unique organization culture that will breed cohesiveness in task performance. This will eliminate the social, economic and ethical barriers likely to bring about confrontation and build a common pull culture for the organization. The managers should also undertake employee back ground check before and after employing them. This will give Intel on the likely behaviors to bring in counterproductive behavior. This will also assist managers to attend to these behaviors by coming up with ideal corrective measures (Hemingway & Maclagan, 2004).