INTERPERSONAL DEVIANT BEHAVIOUR AND ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE OF OIL SERVICING COMPANIES IN PORT HARCOURT, NIGERIA

This paper investigated the impact of interpersonal deviant behaviour on organizational performance of oil servicing companies in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The measures of organizational performance utilized in this paper are productivity, growth and survival. The research design used was a cross-sectional survey. Using purposive sampling, five companies were drawn from the oil servicing sector and a total of eight hundred and two (802) employees from the five companies constituted the study population. A sample size of two hundred and sixty-six (266) employees was drawn using the Taro Yamane’s formula. Instruments for the variable were assessed for reliability using the Cronbach Alpha at a 0.7 threshold. The Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation Coefficient as used to test the postulated hypotheses. The results revealed that interpersonal deviant behaviour has negative but significant correlation with the measures of organizational performance. Although interpersonal deviant behavior may start as a conflict between co-workers, it often mutates into other dimensions of deviance and spills over to the organization impacting on property, production system and organizational processes to the detriment of the performance of oil servicing companies. The study concluded that interpersonal deviant behaviour in the workplace is an issue of serious concern to management and recommended that strategies be put in place to control and mitigate conditions that trigger them. KEYWORDS: Deviant Behaviour, Interpersonal Deviance, Organizational Performance, Productivity, Growth, Survival