Identifying the Representations of the Deviant Workplace Behavior and Examining their Relationship with Organizational Justice and Quality of Supervision of Instruction programs in Schools

The present study aimed at identifying the representations of the deviant workplace behavior of the staff working as the teachers of the schools of Tabriz and examining their relationship with organizational justice and supervision of instruction programs. Behaviors that threaten the organization by violating labor laws are called deviant behaviors. According to the related literature, organizational justice is an important variable in predicting deviation behaviors. Also, educational supervision and guidance – as a model for the development of school staff – can contribute to the occurrence or non-occurrence of the deviant behaviors. So, in this article, we are looking for answers to the following general questions. First, what are the deviant behaviors of teachers? Second, do deviant behaviors have a relationship with organizational justice? Third, can supervision and guidance programs prevent teachers from committing deviant behavior? The study adopted an exploratory mixed-method research design. A qualitative method has been used to identify the representations of the deviant workplace behavior, and a quantitative method has been adopted to examine the relationship between the deviant workplace behaviors and the supervision and guidance programs. The research population has been comprised of all male teachers of Tabriz city (2250 individuals). For the qualitative part of the study, the theoretical, purposive sampling was used and 16 teachers were selected to participate in the interview, while two-stage cluster sampling was employed for the quantitative part of the study. To this end, each of the five educational regions of Tabriz was considered a cluster and regions 2 and 3 were randomly selected from among these 5 clusters. Then, from 130 schools and 841 teachers in the regions 2 and 3, 40 schools and 245 teachers were randomly selected based on Morgan's table, and questionnaires were distributed among them. The deviant workplace behavior questionnaire, prepared based on the results obtained from the qualitative section of the research, was used to measure the teachers' deviant behaviors. The questionnaire had a total of 30 items, and each of them was designed based on a 5-point Likert scale: never (1), rarely (2), usually (3), often (4), always (5). To confirm the content validity of the questionnaire, five educational management specialists examined the questionnaire. The reliability of the deviant behavior questionnaire was 0.80. In order to measure the supervision and guidance programs, Turkzadeh and Nowroozi's (2010) scale with the reliability rate of 0.87 was applied. In the qualitative section, open source coding was used to extract information from the interview data. In the open coding process, the data was carefully examined. For this analysis, the analytical techniques proposed by Strauss and Corbin (2006) were used. Concepts comprised the main analysis units of the open coding phase. The findings of this study were classified in two general categories, four core categories, and 23 subcategories. Teachers' deviant behaviors were identified in two general categories including organizational and interpersonal deviant behaviors and four core categories involving process-oriented, political, financial and interpersonal deviant behaviors. Regarding the quantitative findings, the mean of teachers' scores in the deviant behavior variable is 2 out of 5 and its standard deviation is 0.7. Concerning the organizational justice variable, the average witnessed justice in the teachers' viewpoint is 3.1 out of 5 and its standard deviation is 0.9. The results of regression analysis revealed that the organizational justice variable with a beta score of 0.316 affects the deviant workplace behavior more than all other independent variables and this effect is negative, indicating that the greater the organizational justice, the less the rate of inclination toward committing the deviant behaviors. After the organizational justice variable, the supervision and guidance variable has a beta score of 0.111 which has a relatively modest effect on the deviant workplace behavior, indicating that the more the supervision and guidance of the teachers is, the less their tendency towards deviant behavior will be. The variables of work experience and educational level were excluded from the equation due to the lack of significant correlation with the deviant behavior variable. In interpreting the results obtained from the qualitative section of the research, it can be said that the process-oriented and interpersonal distortions are greater than the financial and political distortions. This can be understood by looking at the subscale of the process-oriented and financial deviation behaviors. The lack of seriousness in performing the assigned tasks has had the highest rate of deviation in the process-oriented category, and gossiping about the coworkers has had the highest rate of occurrence among the interpersonal deviations. The main reason for underworking and imprecision in work can be said to be that teachers do not consider their salary and bonuses proportionate to the amount of work they are expected and so, they try to respond to this perceived injustice through negligence and underworking. In addition, gossiping about others can be attributed to the incorrect cultural tendencies that are prevalent in the country, to the extent that all layers of the society have somehow been involved with this deviation. The origin of this behavior might be attributed to the lack of the indifference of the community members to each other. In Western countries, this phenomenon is less apparent due to the indifference of individuals towards each other. According to the results of the study, it might be suggested that the supervision and guidance programs be firmly included in the school curriculum, and the guidance of the teachers be considered as an approach to the reduction of the deviant and harmful behaviors. Moreover, teachers' understanding of injustice in salary and bonuses should be verified and if the results show the authenticity of their perception, measures should be taken to proportionate the salary and bonuses. Further applied research on the impact of organizational justice, national culture, and professional ethics on the deviant workplace behaviors might also be carried about.