ABSTRACT
Employee theft rates were measured in manufacturing plants during a period in which pay was temporarily reduced by 15%. Employee theft constitutes one of the most pervasive and serious problems in the field of human resource management. Traditionally, social scientists have considered several plausible explanations for employee theft. Hollinger and Clark's suggestion that employee theft is related to feelings of injustice is consistent with several schools of sociological and anthropological thought. Kemper argued that employee theft may be the result of "reciprocal deviance," that is, employees' perceptions that their employers defaulted on their obligations to them, thereby encouraging them to respond with similar acts of deviance. The measure of employee theft used for this study was the company accounting department's standard formula for computing "shrinkage." Responses to the pay basis and pay equity questionnaires were analyzed with anova designs identical to that used for the employee-theft measure.
