With the growing research on deviance, researchers have increasingly identified the two forms of deviance (i.e., positive and negative workplace deviance). In today's competitive environment, organizations must strive to balance these two types of deviance to find their sustainability. Today's cutthroat business environment demands a workplace that encourages employees to be creative and find new ways to work harder and smarter. Ethical leaders play a motivational inspiration for their co-subordinates, allowing them to be positively deviant and try to make processes better and more efficient. But it is not always easy to maintain such a positive environment within the organization as some employees may misuse this freedom and even harm the organization or its people. With the changing generations, today's young mind, (i.e., millennials) consider the positive and healthy competition which boosts their productivity. Thus, managing workplace wellness is part of the sustainable workplace environment.
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This study aims to explore about how a workplace environment can stimulate the working behaviour of the employees with the effect of positive deviance. Deviance is termed as spontaneous activity that breaks important organisational standards and, as a result, endangers the goodwill and image of an organisation, its employees, or perhaps both (Robinson & Bennett 1995). This definition explains the concept concentarated on two major features of deviant actions.
In recent years, there has been increased research about the workplace environment, which links to positive social sustainability results (Riaz et al., 2019; Spreitzer et al., 2012; Zhai et al., 2020; Abid et al., 2020). Social sustainability is defined as the effect of employees’ physical and mental well-being due to the organization's practices to promote sustainability in the workplace environment (Pfeffer, 2010). To employ a healthy environment for employees in the organization, physically and mentally, for the higher participation of employees, thriving at work is a vital component to achieve social sustainability at the workplace (Abid et al., 2019; Spreitzer et al., 2012). Thriving can be explained as the state in which an individual understands the wisdom of strength and knowledge, which is the output of a socially embedded model of thriving (Spreitzer et al., 2005). Thriving is growing in importance in psychology and organizational behaviour (Paterson et al., 2014).
To promote a positive workplace environment, thriving at work is an essential component to encourage the positive psychology among the employees. In previous research, thriving advances the positive work attitude towards the organization (Abid et al., 2020). Thriving employees are emotionally attached to their work and organization (Abid et al., 2019; Li, 2015). Due to this, thriving employees perform their jobs very effectually (Elahi et al., 2019; Paterson et al., 2014; Shan, 2016) by eventually focusing to attain the organizational goals (Basinka, 2017). When an employee feels psychologically healthy during their job, they feel motivated, conduct positive behaviour at their job tasks, and do not resign (Abid et al., 2015; Porath et al., 2012).
When an employee works in high positive motivation, self-sufficiently, and effectively, it is known as psychological enablement of the employees (Spreitzer, 1995; Thomas and Velthouse, 1990). An employee generates control over their work and work’s coordination because of fundamental job inspiration (Seibert et al. 2011; Harrach et al., 2020). Generally, employees coordinate with their work and workplace environment when their aspirations and approaches get fulfilled regarding their work and work role. Thus, this term is related to the psychological empowerment of the employees (Spreitzer 1995).