Honesty-Humility and a Person-Situation Interaction at Work

Person-situation interactions have attracted researchers' attention for decades. Likewise, the current work focuses on the interaction of honesty-humility and situational conditions in bringing about counterproductive work behaviour (CWB). As such, we introduce perceptions of organizational politics as a situational construct representing an opportunity for CWB. In a sample of N = 148 employees we found that particularly individuals low in honesty-humility were affected by situational circumstances. By contrast, those high in honesty-humility reported practically the same (lower) amount of CWB independent of the level of perceptions of organizational politics. In other words, employees low in honesty-humility were especially likely to condition their behaviour on environmental factors, a result that mirrors previous findings. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.