Workerville: Towards an Organizational Behavior Account of Agent Safety

Hanjun Luo, Junting Mao, Yuhan Lu, Haobo Zhang, Zhimu Huang +3

LLM-based agents now interact with their environments continuously, shaped by such organizational channels as user instructions, peer messages, and long-term memory. Existing safety research has examined these influences, but largely as separate agent components. How such factors jointly shape an agent's safety behavior from a unified perspective remains unmeasured. To bridge this gap, we advocate organizational behavior (OB) as a framework for studying the safety of advanced agents, reorganizing the objects of study, theoretical foundations, and experimental design around the relational structure in which agents operate. We present the first systematic formalization of counterproductive work behavior (CWB), a canonical safety-relevant subfield of OB, as Agentic Counterproductive Behavior (ACB). ACB specifies three organizational antecedents (vertical supervisor relations, horizontal peer norms, and internal cognitive structures) and maps them onto three counterproductive outcome dimensions (unauthorized disclosure, destructive operations, and production deviation). To operationalize ACB, we introduce Workerville, a controlled benchmark that manipulates organizational conditions…