Career Jobs, Survival Jobs, and Employee Deviance: A Social Investment Model of Workplace Misconduct

We examine the relationship between career stakes, or the fit between workers' current jobs and their long-term career plans, and employee deviance. Most prior research has focused on the link between job satisfaction and deviance, but career stakes may be a more salient and theoretically relevant measure of workers' investments in their present positions, particularly in young adulthood. We hypothesize that people whose current jobs match their long-term career goals have made a social investment with their employers that inhibits deviant behavior. We analyze data from the Youth Development Study (YDS), a longitudinal community sample of individuals now in their mid-twenties. Our results show that career stakes and job satisfaction exert independent effects on worker misconduct even when prior levels of general deviance and workplace deviance are statistically controlled.