Exploring grey rocking as a mediator between employee intelligence and disengagement in toxic work climates

This paper looks at the way that employees manage their behaviour within unpleasant working conditions by identifying the associations between multidimensional employee intelligence, grey rocking behaviour, perceived workplace toxicity, and employee disengagement. The cross-sectional quantitative design was based on the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) and Conservation of Resources (COR) models on the basis of survey data on 612 professionals in various industries in India. Scales that have been developed or modified were used to collect data and analysed with the Consolidated Factor Analysis (CFA) and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). The findings show that the intelligence of employees is positively correlated with the behaviour of grey rocking (β=0.13, p < 0.05). Grey rocking has a positive correlation with employee disengagement (β= 0.10, p = 0.001) as well as, to some extent with the relationship between employee intelligence and disengagement (β= 0.147, p = 0.01). Moreover, the grey rocking-disengagement correlation is contingently stronger in the context of perceived workplace toxicity (β=0.91, p < 0.05), meaning that there are stronger associations between the two under high toxicity. The model describes a significant amount of variance in the disengagement (R 2 = 0.52) at a good fit (CFI = 0.921, RMSEA = 0.047). Since this is a cross-sectional design, the results are a manifestation of statistical relationships but not causality. The conceptualization of grey rocking and disengagement as a comorbidity to workplace strain is made. The research notes that it is important to deal with the problem of workplace toxicity on the organisational level.