Love, Hate, Ambivalence, or Indifference? A Conceptual Examination of Workplace Crimes and Organizational Identification

Although research has shown that there may be very different types of workplace crimes, scholarly work in this area (a) is currently fragmented with very little communication between very similar streams of research and (b) tends to be incomplete and can lead to conflicting findings. We address both of these shortcomings. First, we propose a typology of different types of workplace crimes (consisting of pro-organizational, nonaligned-organizational, and anti-organizational crimes) based on the intentions of the perpetrators. Second, we link these intentions to various identification “pathologies”—such as over-identification and over-disidentification, under-identification and ambivalent identification—and argue that these pathologies are linked to propensities to commit certain types of workplace crimes. Specifically, we contend that over-identification and over-disidentification have direct effects on workplace crimes, whereas under-identification and ambivalent identification indirectly influence the propensity to engage in workplace crimes. We suggest that this research aids us in clarifying the inconsistent conclusions in previous work in the domain of workplace crimes and that it emphasizes the importance of including organizational identification as a key factor in the extant models of workplace crimes. This research also highlights policy implications regarding workplace crimes in that it suggests that different agencies may be more effective in enforcing the law and disciplining those engaged in the different types of workplace crimes.