A new University of Florida study finds that even the best employees can become negative and unproductive when mistreated by their boss.

Behaviors that are usually associated with bad employees - gossiping, pilfering, backstabbing, tardiness, long lunch breaks, playing, among others - can become normal behavior for model employees who feel put down by their supervisors, said Timothy Judge, a UF management professor who led the research.

“When employees feel they’re mistreated, they get even,” Judge said. “If they think their supervisor is nasty toward them, they will find a way to restore that perceived level of injustice.”

The findings are important because employers often act as if workers’ attitudes are irrelevant and have no effect on how well they perform, he said.

Many companies assume employees are motivated only by money or the threat of losing their jobs, not realizing that positive management-labor relations influence how long workers remain with an employer and the extent to which they engage in helping behaviors, he said.

“Training supervisors to treat employees with respect is not something that costs employers a lot of money, and it can produce real dividends,” he said.

The study looked at how people’s moods influenced their work attitudes. It included 64 full-time employees from different parts of the country. Participants completed daily surveys over three weeks about their mood, job satisfaction, deviant behavior at work and perceived treatment by their supervisor.

In addition to self-ratings of behavior, immediate supervisors completed an online questionnaire indicating how often the employee had done things, such as steal property from work, litter the work environment, curse at coworkers and leave work without permission.

The results, published in the January issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology, showed that all employees misbehaved under certain conditions, particularly if they were angry at work, disliked their jobs or believed their supervisors were unfair.

Most important was the amount of hostility employees felt, which was influenced by how they thought their supervisors treated them.

“If your supervisor is mean or rude to you, it increases your workplace deviance because it makes you angry and frustrated,” Judge said.

Although the study only focused on a small segment of the population, the results provide much insight into keeping a company running smoothly and productively. If good employees continue positive behavior, then maybe bad employees would be encouraged to have better behavior under the same circumstances.

Unfortunately, many human resource departments adopt policies and practices designed to end bad behavior rather than look for its root causes.

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