ABSTRACT
We examine the relationship between career stakes,
or the fit between workers' current jobs and their long-term career plans, and
employee deviance. Most prior research has focused on the link between job
satisfaction and deviance, but career stakes may be a more salient and
theoretically relevant measure of workers’ investments in their present
positions, particularly in young adulthood. We hypothesize that people whose
current jobs match their long-term career goals have made a social investment
with their employers that inhibits deviant behavior. We analyze data from the
Youth Development Study (YDS), a longitudinal community sample of individuals
now in their mid-twenties. Our results show that career stakes and job
satisfaction exert independent effects on worker misconduct even when prior levels
of general deviance and workplace deviance are statistically controlled.