Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 11, 2000

Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting

Sabotage in the Workplace
The Role of Justice

This study examines the relationship between injustice and sabotage behavior. Our hypotheses examine: 1) the frequency of justice as a cause of sabotage, 2) the relationship between distributive and procedural justice and sabotage motive (restoration of equity or retaliation), 3) the relationship between source of injustice and target of sabotage, and 4) the relationship between type of injustice and severity of sabotage behavior. The results supported the first three hypotheses. First, injustice was the most common cause of sabotage. Second, individuals were more likely to engage in retaliation when the source of injustice was interpersonal, while restoring equity was more common when the source of injustice was distributive. Third, the source of injustice and the target of sabotage were the same. We discuss the implication of these results for future research on sabotage and dysfunctional workplace behavior.