Predicting retail shrink from performance pressure, ethical leader behavior, and store‐level incivility

Abstract

Summary Retail shrink, a form of inventory loss due primarily to employee theft and shoplifting, is a growing concern for retailers. Prior work on shrink has taken primarily an individual‐level focus to understanding this problem but has yet to really explore how the business context impacts shrink. The current study addresses this need by delineating and testing a unit‐level (i.e., between‐stores) conceptual model, wherein we examine the influence of performance pressure, ethical leader behavior, and store‐level incivility on shrink in a field study of 111 U.S. retail stores. Results demonstrate that performance pressure and ethical leadership interact to influence store‐level incivility. Further, stores with higher incivility also had higher levels of shrink. A focus on the contextual predictors of shrink provides timely insights into the role of performance pressure and leadership on store‐level incivility and consequently on retail shrink. In light of increasingly thin margins in the retail industry, the evidence on how pressure to perform and ethical leadership influences retail shrink may offer a solution to retailers looking to stem financial losses by promoting civility in the workplace.

Linking performance pressure to employee work engagement: the moderating role of emotional stability

“…work pressure, performance pressure) as threatening may feel stress (Casper and Sonnentag, 2019) and may concentrate on the difficulties of raising performance and the adverse consequences that will likely result if performance demands are not met (Mitchell et al, 2019). These perceptions could also lead employees to experience negative outcomes such as job dissatisfaction (Quratulain and Khan, 2015), deviant behavior (Jensen et al, 2019;Soomro et al, 2020) and low job involvement (Sonnentag and Kruel, 2006) if performance is not raised. However, we lack empirical evidence on whether performance pressure impacts employee work engagement through threat appraisal.…”

Workplace incivility: a literature review

“…As a result, employee parenthood and organizational parental leave policies moderated the effects of employee gender on experienced incivility, which led, in turn, to the career withdrawal. The last study of this category was conducted by Jensen et al (2019), which focused on performance pressure, ethical leadership, store incivility and store shrink. Accordingly, the performance pressure along with ethical leadership influenced store-level incivility.…”

Linking performance pressure to employee work engagement: the moderating role of emotional stability

“…Research on performance pressure has found that it is a unique and dynamic work stressor which acts as a double-edged sword in that it can motivate employees to perform well (Mitchell et al, 2019), be more ethical (Ness et al, 2017) and creative (Zhang et al, 2017), while also increasing stress (Mitchell et al, 2018) and deviant behavior (Jensen et al, 2019). Mitchell et al (2019) theorized that performance pressure elicits both positive and negative workrelated behaviors which depends on the extent to which individuals appraise the performance pressure as a challenge or a threat.…”