Can “Bad” Stressors Spur “Bad” Behavior? An Emotion-Stress Model of Workplace Mistreatments

Drawing on the stressor-emotion model, our research investigates the mediation mechanism of employee cynicism in the association between workplace mistreatment and counterproductive work behavior. Moreover, we explore the boundary condition of proactive personality in the association between workplace mistreatment, employee cynicism, and counterproductive work behavior. Using the time-lag approach, 287 bank employees were recruited and tested our hypotheses. We found that employee cynicism mediates the association between three dimensions of workplace mistreatment and counterproductive work behavior. Verbal abuse was found to be a strong predictor of counterproductive work behavior, followed by workplace obstruction and then emotional neglect. Moreover, proactive personality moderates verbal abuse-employee cynicism, emotional neglect-employee cynicism, and employee cynicism-counterproductive work behavior associations. Finally, implications, limitations, and future research are presented.