OVER-TIRED AND UNDER CONTROL? SLEEP DEPRIVATION, RESOURCE DEPLETION, AND WORKPLACE DEVIANCE

Abstract

Organizations are increasingly devoting interest towards understanding the causes of workplace deviance behaviors, which include interpersonal aggression, theft, violence, vandalism and sabotage. These behaviors are particularly relevant to organizations, in that the yearly losses due to theft are estimated at over 40 billion dollars for U.S. businesses (Coffin, 2003), and acts of workplace deviance could cost as much as 200 billion dollars annually (Murphy, 1993).In this research, I integrated theoretical perspectives from psychology and organizational behavior with neurocognitive evidence in order to examine the effects of sleep deprivation on workplace deviance behavior. In particular, I argue that cognitive resource theories offer explanatory power for the proposed linkage between sleep loss and deviant behaviors. Specifically, sleep deprivation was expected to reduce cognitive capacity and self-regulatory ability, and as a result decrease individuals' self-control, increase hostility, and impair moral decisions, which would in turn increase workplace deviance. Finally, proposed methods are presented for two studies. The first study utilized a field sample of shiftworkers with irregular sleep schedules (i.e., nurses). The second study utilized a lab sample of university students who were subjected to sleep deprivation conditions in a controlled environment.Results largely supported the model in both samples, with the exception of moral reasoning, which was unrelated to sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation affected self-control and hostility, which were in turn related to deviance, with the exception of self-control and interpersonal deviance in Study 2.