Jörg W. Kirchhoff

Expansion of Output : Organizational Misbehaviour in Public Enterprises

The term ‘restriction of output’ is a basic category in research on resistance and organizational misbehaviour and it has many synonyms, but seems to lack antonyms. The term means, of course, that employees do less work than they are expected to by management. The opposite behaviour is in the management literature regarded as organization citizenship behaviour, a term with several synonyms as well as antonyms. This article argues that ‘expansion of output’ can be a form of organizational misbehaviour and an antonym to restriction of output. The study bases its argument on empirical findings from the public sector: workers doing more than they are expected to do in order to resist management control. A typology of different kinds of expansion of output is suggested.