Organizational misbehavior (OMB) is always relevant because it is always occurring. Defined as:
“Any intentional action by a member of an organization who defies and violates shared organizational norms and expectations, and/or core societal values, mores and standards of proper conduct”,
OMB cripples organizations large and small in every industry. Major corporations, from Enron to Barings Bank, have been ruined because of major misbehaviors like fraud and misrepresentation. Even small workplaces are rife with relatively minor mischief ranging from bullying by abusive supervisors to sexual harassment.
OMB furnishes a steady supply of alarming headlines and comes with a hefty price tag. Estimates of the costs of just the most direct and obvious misbehavior, employee theft, run as high as $50 billion annually in the United States alone. Substance abuse, another OMB, is an even greater threat to operations and profitability, costing American employers a whopping $160 billion a year.
Missing the Bigger Picture
Although workplaces naturally include a very wide variety of negative behaviors and attitudes, most of the current research deals only with the traditional human resource management (HRM) point of view of organizational productivity. It addresses the usual topics of training, group performance and team effectiveness, appraisals and feedback. But this is far from the true picture of OMB and its effects.
Professor Yoav Vardi, formerly from Tel-Aviv University and a senior advisor for eLoomina, realized that the phenomenon of workplace aggression, was rarely studied, a very surprising finding considering that a significant amount of research has been devoted to factors that cause, facilitate, or exacerbate human aggression in general, albeit not specifically in the workplace.
Professor Vardi went on to create a comprehensive OMB model based on his breakthrough research devoted to the workplace.
Modeling Workplace OMB
At the core of OMB is the understanding that misbehavior in organizations should not only be viewed as pervasive, but as intentional work-related behavior that results in negative consequences for both individuals and the organization. It is not a marginal, deviant organizational occurrence to be dealt with as a side-issue, but is every bit as genuine as proper, conventional and acceptable workplace behavior. In fact, it is a common, and integral, aspect of organizational reality and even an important facet of individual, group, and organization conduct.
As such, OMB requires an entirely new approach.
OMB Manifestations
It gets complicated in a hurry. Trying to identify all possible expressions of OMB seems endless because the perception of a certain act to be counter-normative is highly contingent upon situational factors. Moreover, researchers often use different designations for the same or similar classes of actions. For instance, workplace aggression, workplace victimization, workplace bullying, abusive supervision, and destructive leadership all refer to a wide spectrum of hostile, verbal and non-verbal, abusive behaviors in the workplace. The terminology and definitions are not commonly used and understood.
OMB Behaviors
After defining manifestations, we move onto the behaviors themselves.
According to Vardi’s research, OMB is classified into three basic categories based on the underlying intention of the misbehaving individual:
Misbehaviors intended to benefit the self (OMB Type S), Misbehaviors that primarily intend to benefit the member’s employing organization (OMB Type O), and Misbehaviors that are primarily intended to inflict damage and cause harm (OMB Type D).
Productizing the OMB Model
As a thought leader with decades of subject matter expertise in employee misbehavior analysis eLoomina developed sophisticated algorithms backed by advanced AI technologies to put a highly effective OMB Model at the service of organizations that want to identify and mitigate fraud and other types of misbehavior before it causes harm. Our novel solution automatically discovers improper behavioral signs and raises red flags early enough to enable organizations to significantly reduce internal fraud.. It automatically looks at company data from HR, Finance, IT, and Operations, and maps it to our library of indicators.
The integration of the OMB Model with eLoomina’s extensive data analysis and AI-based software brings superior value to organizations that adopt our solution. As we deploy the eLoomina solution at more organizations, our AI grows in value and makes us front runners in the fight against costly Organizational Misbehavior.