The relative impact of employees’ discrete emotions on employees’ negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) and counterproductive workplace behavior (CWB)
Journal of Product & Brand Management
ISSN: 1061-0421
Article publication date: 8 March 2022
Issue publication date: 10 August 2022
Abstract
Purpose
With the emergence of a variety of communication channels on social media, employees have more opportunities to engage with external stakeholders for or against their organizational brand. In such a context, focusing on negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) as an employee’s negative discretionary brand-oriented behavior, the current study aimed to identify negative emotions that can serve as drivers for NWOM more strongly than for counterproductive workplace behavior (CWB), relying on the discrete emotion perspective. This study also aimed to examine whether employees’ perceived brand knowledge can directly diminish employees’ NWOM and CWB and attenuate the influence of negative emotions.
Design/methodology/approach
A questionnaire was used to gather relevant data, which were analyzed by structural equation modeling.
Findings
The findings showed that anger was more strongly associated with employees’ NWOM than withdrawal and that envy was more strongly associated with CWB toward individuals than employees’ NWOM. Employees’ perceived brand knowledge was negatively associated with both NWOM and CWB directly and mitigated the association of negative emotions such as anger and envy with CWB, but not with NWOM.
Originality/value
Based on the discrete emotion perspective, the current study explored the relative magnitude of emotional antecedents for employees’ NWOM and conventional CWB. Also, it expanded the previous findings on the positive effects of perceived brand knowledge on the positive outcomes of employees’ actions and its mitigating effects on NWOM and CWB.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Funding: The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Citation
Lee, S.B., Liu, S.H. and Maertz, C. (2022), "The relative impact of employees’ discrete emotions on employees’ negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) and counterproductive workplace behavior (CWB)", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 31 No. 7, pp. 1018-1032. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-07-2021-3555
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited