Mistreatment in Organizations: Volume 13

In this chapter, we examine employee prosocial rule breaking as a response to organizations’ unfair treatment of customers. Drawing on the deontic perspective and research on third-party reactions to unfairness, we suggest employees engage in customer-directed prosocial rule breaking when they believe their organizations’ policies treat customers unfairly. Additionally, we consider employee, customer, and situational characteristics that enhance or inhibit the relationship between employees’ perceptions of organizational policy unfairness and customer-directed prosocial rule breaking.

In this chapter, we summarize and build on the current state of the customer mistreatment literature in an effort to further future research on this topic. First, we detail the four primary conceptualizations of customer mistreatment. Second, we present a multilevel model of customer mistreatment, which distinguishes between the unfolding processes at the individual employee level and the service encounter level. In particular, we consider the antecedents and outcomes unique to each level of analysis as well as mediators and moderators. Finally, we discuss important methodological concerns and recommendations for future research.

A number of theoretical frameworks exist to explain perpetrators’ motivation for workplace aggression. Most of them consider these behaviors as retaliatory actions from individuals who experience triggering events in their workplaces. The current chapter describes a model that focuses on the motivations underlying proactive workplace aggression, and identifies situations where perpetrators consider their aggressive behaviors as morally justifiable. In particular, we argue that depending on the targets’ in- versus out-group membership and higher- versus lower-status in the hierarchy, aggressive behaviors may be viewed as acceptable to achieve perpetrators’ goals of forcing compliance or managing identity. The model extends the current literature by considering non-retaliatory workplace aggression, and by identifying potential avenues for future research and intervention to reduce proactive workplace aggression.

Workplace incivility has been identified as a specific form of social mistreatment causing distress despite its low intensity. Research on workplace incivility has touched on a variety of personal and contextual factors associated with incivility’s prevalence including research on both antecedents and outcomes. The research has been especially concerned with identifying a wide range of negative consequences of incivility, including various occupational, interpersonal, and health-related implications. Theoretical explorations have considered links of incivility to sexism and racism, and its reflection of attachment styles, as well as its inherent connection with the stressor-emotion model of counterproductive work behavior (Spector & Fox, 2005). The power of incivility to elicit distress has been attributed to its capacity to signal riskiness of social situations that thwart core social motives (i.e., self-control). Intervention research has been relatively rare, but progress is evident.

We explore the antecedents of workplace ostracism and delineate possible organizational interventions to deter ostracism. Under the lens of evolutionary psychology we argue that individuals deemed capable of contributing to social and organizational goals become valued group members while those who threaten group stability and viability risk being shunned or ostracized. Specifically, we review empirical evidence and present the results of a pilot study suggesting that those who are perceived to violate injunctive and descriptive norms, as well as threaten one’s self-concept are at increased risk for ostracism. In terms of intervention, we propose mindfulness techniques and organizational support as a route to deter employees’ inclinations to ostracize coworkers. Thus, a primary goal of this chapter is to explicate a framework for identifying the predictors and deterrents of workplace ostracism in order to generate additional research on this important topic.

One particular egregious type of workplace mistreatment is supervisor abuse, which has received extensive attention due to its heavy cost to organizations including up to 23 billion dollars in annual loss resulting from increases in absenteeism, health care costs, and productivity loss. Employees attribute causes to abusive supervision, and these attributions impact subsequent reactions. In some cases, employees may feel that abusive supervision is justified, leading to the reaction of Schadenfreude, or pleasure in another’s pain. In this chapter, we discuss antecedents to Schadenfreude, its role in observed mistreatment, and propose a conceptual model based on attribution theory.

Contextual factors play a vital role in employee mistreatment. This chapter deals with the definition and scope of contextual factors, including a distinction between the objective environment and its idiosyncratic perception by employees. Several mechanisms are offered to explain the effects of context on mistreatment, including the stressor–strain framework, interaction with personal characteristics, and also mistreatment acting as a stressor. The framework suggested in this chapter uses levels of analysis, and proposes that the objective environment (group level variables) is perceived at the individual level, which consequently leads to both perpetrated and received mistreatment. Those same objective environment variables also have a direct effect on mistreatment, as well as a moderating role in the relationship between individually perceived context and mistreatment. Furthermore, there is some evidence that mistreatment acts as a contextual variable in and of itself, with perpetrators, victims, and bystanders perceiving mistreatment in their workplace and reporting higher levels of stressors and strains. Finally, we outline the need for more longitudinal, multi-level studies to clearly discern the role of context in employee mistreatment.

Workplace abuse, interpersonal mistreatment that occurs within the victim’s work environment, has attracted considerable attention in recent years. In this chapter, we argue that problems with the conceptualization and measurement of workplace abuse have thwarted scientific progress. We identify two needs that we believe are especially pressing: (a) the need to consider the construct breadth of workplace abuse scales and (b) the need to test whether the measures of various types of workplace abuse effectively capture the unique qualities of the constructs they purport to assess. To guide our discussion of these issues, we conducted a review of the item content of several workplace abuse measures. We offer suggestions for addressing these and other conceptualization and measurement issues, and we discuss the possible implications of these issues on the study of the hypothesized predictors and consequences of workplace abuse.