Abstract
Remote Health Care Practitioners (RHCPs) work in remote and isolated locations across the globe. RHCPs’ actual and perceived isolation in conjunction with reduced supervision and oversight may be conducive to deviant professional practices as well as broader workplace deviant behaviors. Such deviant behaviors are bound to undermine the quality of healthcare, and generate significant risks for patients as well as the health care provider, and client. In this paper, we developed and tested a model of the relationship between perceived isolation, professional deviance and broader workplace deviant behaviors. Data was collected from 142 participants employed as RHCPs in the North Sea sites of the United Kingdom. As hypothesized, we found that perceived isolation was positively related to both professional deviance and broader workplace deviant behaviors. Contrary to our expectations, professional deviance was negatively rather than positively related to broader workplace deviance. We recommend organizations providing healthcare in remote locations to minimize the negative effects of professional and broader workplace deviance by reducing employees’ perceived isolation, and reacting promptly to even the smallest episodes of non-compliance and misbehavior either directed against individual employees or organization as a whole.