Affected by job stress, "agreeable and conscientious" workers may resist the tendency to engage in counter-productive work behaviour (CWB), but eventually they too give in, new research says.
While "agreeable" employees are considered cooperative, good-natured and trusting of the organisation, "conscientious" workers are those who are ambitious, responsible and abide by ethical principles.
Many employees wait weeks or months before engaging in counter-productive work behaviour, like taking a longer lunch or stealing office supplies, the findings showed.
"Your personality might influence how you try to cope initially, but if things are bad for a really long time, it does not matter what your personality is," said psychologist Kevin Eschleman from the San Francisco State University in the US.
"At the end of the day, you are going to do these deviant things," Eschleman said.
Researchers surveyed employees in a variety of career fields three times over six months about stress at work.
They found that, as expected, increase in stress led to immediate increase in CWB.
But they also found something that is not often recognised by organisations: Some people who did not engage in such behaviour at first nevertheless did so some weeks or months later.
"Maybe you do not have the opportunity to engage in these deviant behaviors right away, and you want to wait until no one is around," Eschleman added.
"Or maybe you think you can cope right away, but then down the road you end up engaging in these behaviours," he concluded.
The study appeared in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.