Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) as a discretionary behavior which violates the organizational norms has attracted considerable research attention during the recent years (e.g., Bowling and Burns, 2015; Spector and Zhou, 2014; Fida et al., 2014).CWB refers to “voluntary behavior that violates significant organizational norms and in so doing threatens the well-being of an organization, its members, or both” (Robinson and Bennett, 1995. P.556), which usually include behaviors such as theft, sabotaging organization’s properties, spreading rumors, absenteeism, and sexual harassment.

Review of the extant literature provides insight into different frameworks or categorization of CWB which clearly distinguish between acts directed at individuals and at organization (Robinson and Bennett, 1995; Bennett and Robinson, 2000).However, such categorization is beyond the scope of this study. According to the definition of CWB, it is obvious that such behavior will cost extreme amount of financial and non-financial problems to the organization and its members. Regarding the negative impacts of the phenomenon, reports revealed that CWB costs organizations billions of dollars per annum (Bowling and Gruys, 2010). Particularly, CWB is reported to occur in the airline industry (Hsieh et al., 2004), due to flight attendants’ specific working environment where dim lights, long night shifts, aggressive and destructive passengers, air pressure and other types of harmful physical elements make it difficult to work in the airplane (Neuman and Baron, 1998; O’Leary-Kelly et al., 1996). Hsieh et al. (2004), strongly suggest that the antecedents of CWB in the airline and tourism industry deserve more attention in order to avoid losses associated with such behavior. In Iran, few studies focused on counterproductive work behaviors. Particularly, there is no evidence of practical statistics or surveys with respect to the loss incurred by such behavior.

Several studies attempted to reveal the causes of CWB in the organization such as Stressors, Negative emotions and Moral disengagement (Fida et al., 2014); Personality trait (Oh et al., 2014); Fairness, emotion and emotion regulation (Matta et al., 2014); Narcissism (Grijalva and Newman, 2015) and Status judgment and identification (Al-Atwi and Bakir, 2014). In a More relevant approach, Samnani and Power (2014) found a negative association between strong HRM practices and CWB directed to individuals.