The Antisocial Behaviors Scale<\/strong> (ABS), developed by organizational psychologists Sandra L. Robinson and Anne M. O’Leary-Kelly (1998), is a seminal 9-item psychometric instrument designed to assess the frequency with which employees engage in behaviors that violate organizational norms and inflict harm upon coworkers, supervisors, or the organization itself. Grounded in social learning theory<\/a> and social information processing paradigms, the scale measures individual-level antisocial conduct while facilitating multilevel investigations into peer influence and behavioral contagion within intact work units. The instrument utilizes a 5-point Likert-type frequency response continuum ranging from 1 (very infrequently<\/em>) to 5 (very frequently<\/em>), prompting respondents to evaluate behavioral occurrences across a one-year retrospective timeframe.<\/p>\n Psychometric evaluations across diverse organizational samples demonstrate satisfactory internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha<\/a> coefficients ranging between .68 and .81. Construct validity is supported by positive associations with work group antisocial behavior and interpersonal antagonism, along with theoretical negative correlations with general job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behaviors<\/a> (OCBs). Structurally, although the items encompass actions directed against both individuals (e.g., verbal abuse, interpersonal conflict) and the broader organization (e.g., property damage, rule bending, deliberate work slowdowns), the instrument functions as a parsimonious, composite unidimensional metric of counterproductive organizational conduct. The ABS remains an influential measurement tool in organizational behavior, industrial-organizational psychology, and occupational health research for dissecting toxic workplace dynamics and contextual determinants of employee deviance.<\/p>\n Antisocial Behaviors Scale, Counterproductive Work Behavior, Workplace Deviance, Social Learning Theory, Employee Misbehavior, Interpersonal Conflict, Organizational Aggression, Peer Contagion, Robinson and O’Leary-Kelly, Psychometrics, Workplace Incivility, Organizational Citizenship Behavior<\/p>\n The Antisocial Behaviors Scale was conceptualized and empirically validated by:<\/p>\n The foundational research was published in the Academy of Management Journal<\/em> in 1998, supported by field investigations conducted across diverse manufacturing, financial, and service sectors.<\/p>\n The overarching purpose of the Antisocial Behaviors Scale is to systematically identify, quantify, and track dysfunctional workplace actions that disrupt interpersonal relations and undermine corporate functionality. Prior to the late 1990s, research into workplace malfeasance predominantly emphasized catastrophic, low-base-rate events such as physical violence, grand larceny, or catastrophic corporate sabotage. Robinson and O’Leary-Kelly recognized that organizations are far more persistently compromised by insidious, pervasive, moderate-intensity behaviors—such as spreading derogatory rumors, deliberately slowing down productivity, griping, and openly criticizing leadership. Consequently, the ABS was crafted to measure actionable behaviors that cross the threshold into deviance without restricting the operational focus to overt criminal offenses.<\/p>\n In applied organizational research, the ABS fulfills three principal functions:<\/p>\n The psychological construct operationalized by the ABS is antisocial behavior in the workplace<\/em>. Robinson and O’Leary-Kelly define this construct as any deliberate action undertaken by an organizational member that brings or is intended to bring harm to an organization, its employees, or its stakeholders. This operationalization overlaps with, yet maintains conceptual boundaries distinct from, several parallel constructs in occupational psychology:<\/p>\n Although scored primarily as a unidimensional composite index, the construct encapsulates two foundational targets of antisocial manifestation:<\/p>\n The conceptual architecture of the Antisocial Behaviors Scale is fundamentally anchored in Albert Bandura<\/a>‘s (1977, 1986) Social Learning Theory<\/strong> (later expanded into Social Cognitive Theory). Bandura posited that individuals acquire complex behavioral repertoires not merely through direct conditioning or reinforcement, but primarily through vicarious observation, cognitive modeling, and the assimilation of behavioral patterns exhibited by salient role models. In organizational settings, proximate coworkers serve as powerful observational models whose ongoing actions convey normative cues regarding what forms of conduct are tolerated, condoned, or rewarded.<\/p>\n Robinson and O’Leary-Kelly extended this paradigm via the “Monkey see, monkey do” framework, integrating principles from Gerald Salancik and Jeffrey Pfeffer’s (1978) Social Information Processing Theory<\/strong>. According to this integrative perspective, workplace environments are cognitively ambiguous; employees actively scan their immediate social environment to interpret behavioral boundaries and construct subjective norms. When an employee repeatedly witnesses peers bending corporate regulations, voicing hostility toward leadership, or sabotaging tools without formal reprimand, two psychological phenomena occur:<\/p>\n Consequently, the ABS was operationalized to assess behaviors directly susceptible to this peer social transmission process. Robinson and O’Leary-Kelly theorized that individual scores on the ABS would not merely correlate with individual psychopathology or negative affectivity, but would mirror the aggregated antisocial behavior of the individual’s reference work unit. Their seminal 1998 findings substantiated this theoretical proposition, demonstrating significant contextual group-level effects above and beyond personal demographic characteristics and baseline individual differences.<\/p>\n Validation of the Antisocial Behaviors Scale has been established through empirical research confirming construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity.<\/p>\n In the primary validation study by Robinson and O’Leary-Kelly (1998), the ABS exhibited significant convergent validity against related personality and behavioral markers. Individual self-reported antisocial behavior correlated positively with measures of general antagonistic behavior and hostility ($r = .35, p < .01$<\/span>). Furthermore, the scale demonstrated substantial convergence across observation sources: individual self-ratings of antisocial behavior exhibited positive correlations with supervisor and peer nominations of employee misconduct, demonstrating that the scale accurately captures observable behavioral tendencies rather than mere subjective self-deprecation.<\/p>\n A central validation metric for the ABS is its capacity to detect work unit contagion. Utilizing hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) and cross-level regression, Robinson and O’Leary-Kelly established that individual ABS scores were positively predicted by the aggregated antisocial behavior of the surrounding work group ($r = .24, p < .01$<\/span>), even after statistically controlling for individual tenure, age, and gender. The scale also demonstrated strong criterion validity in predicting workplace attrition and disengagement: individual antisocial behavior was negatively correlated with overall job satisfaction ($r = -.28, p < .01$<\/span>). At the group level, antisocial behavior correlated positively with employee group tenure ($r = .27$<\/span>), while demonstrating negative correlations with employee age, job tenure, and retention outcomes.<\/p>\n To substantiate that the ABS does not merely mirror the inverse of prosocial functioning, the authors evaluated its relationship with organizational citizenship behaviors<\/a> (OCBs). Although ABS scores correlated negatively with OCB dimensions ($r = -.31, p < .01$<\/span>), factor analytic tests indicated that antisocial behaviors and citizenship behaviors loaded onto distinct, orthogonal latent factors rather than opposing ends of a single continuum. An employee can simultaneously engage in selective citizenship behaviors while engaging in targeted antisocial acts, confirming the distinct structural integrity of the ABS.<\/p>\n The psychometric reliability of the Antisocial Behaviors Scale has been tested across varying organizational environments:<\/p>\n During the development of the ABS, Robinson and O’Leary-Kelly explored the underlying structural dimensionality of the 9 items using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis techniques.<\/p>\n Initial principal components analysis and principal axis factoring with varimax rotation revealed an empirical structure predominantly governed by a single dominant eigenvalue accounting for over 38% of the total variance. While a two-factor extraction naturally groups items into an Interpersonal Antisocial Factor<\/em> (items 2, 4, 6, 8, and 9) and an Organizational\/Production Antisocial Factor<\/em> (items 1, 3, 5, and 7), the inter-factor correlation between these sub-dimensions typically exceeds $r = .60$<\/span>. Consequently, the authors elected to retain the single-factor, unidimensional composite model to optimize practical utility and theoretical parsimony.<\/p>\n In subsequent confirmatory evaluations, the single-factor model demonstrated acceptable fit to empirical field data when error covariances between highly similar behavioral manifestations (e.g., verbal criticism and griping) were accounted for:<\/p>\n The structural characteristics, administration protocol, and scoring configuration of the Antisocial Behaviors Scale are detailed below:<\/p>\n The Antisocial Behaviors Scale was published in 1998<\/strong> by the Academy of Management<\/a> within the Academy of Management Journal<\/em> (Vol. 41, No. 6, pp. 658–672). The copyright is held by the Academy of Management.<\/p>\n The following foundational publications document the development, validation, and theoretical framework of the Antisocial Behaviors Scale:<\/p>\n Instructions:<\/strong> Please indicate how frequently you have engaged in each of the following behaviors within the year prior.<\/p>\n Response Scale:<\/strong> 1 = Very infrequently, 2 = Infrequently, 3 = Sometimes, 4 = Frequently, 5 = Very frequently<\/span><\/p>\n Comprehensive academic overview of the Antisocial Behaviors Scale (ABS) developed by Robinson and O’Leary-Kelly (1998), covering its theoretical foundation in social learning theory, psychometric properties, factor structure, and authentic survey items.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[26658,13,2],"tags":[26659,10864,22382,6,26660,290,22109],"class_list":["post-8997","psych_scale","type-psych_scale","status-publish","hentry","category-behavioral-assessments","category-organizational-psychology","category-psychometrics","tag-antisocial-behaviors-scale","tag-counterproductive-work-behavior","tag-employee-misbehavior","tag-psychometrics","tag-robinson-and-oleary-kelly","tag-social-learning-theory","tag-workplace-deviance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale\/8997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/psych_scale"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale\/8997\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}2. Keywords<\/h2>\n
3. Authors<\/h2>\n
\n
4. Purpose<\/h2>\n
\n
5. Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
Comparison with Related Constructs<\/h3>\n
\n
Core Behavioral Targets<\/h3>\n
\n
6. Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
\n
7. Validity<\/h2>\n
Convergent and Concurrent Validity<\/h3>\n
Criterion-Related and Multilevel Validity<\/h3>\n
Discriminant Validity<\/h3>\n
8. Reliability<\/h2>\n
\n
9. Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)<\/h3>\n
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)<\/h3>\n
\n
10. Instrument \/ Measurement Tool<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
\n
11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year<\/h2>\n
\n
12. References<\/h2>\n
\n
13. Items of the Scale<\/h2>\n
\n