Eyes wide open: perceived exploitation and its consequences

Drawing on the array of literature on exploitation from several social science disciplines, we propose a new way of seeing employer-employee relationships by introducing the concept of perceived exploitative employee-organization relationships, distinguish it from related concepts, and conduct five studies to develop a scale and test our theoretical model of the effects of such employee perceptions. Contributing to the Employee-Organization Relationships and workplace emotions literatures, perceived exploitation is defined as employees’ perceptions that they have been purposefully taken advantage of in their relationship with the organization, to the benefit of the organization itself. We propose and find that such perceptions are associated with both outward-focused emotions of anger and hostility toward the organization and inward-focused ones of shame and guilt at remaining in an exploitative job. In two studies including construction workers and a time-lagged study of medical residents, we find that the emotions of anger and hostility partially mediate the effects of perceived exploitation on employee engagement, revenge against the organization, organizational commitment, and turnover intentions, whereas the emotions of shame and guilt partially mediate the effects of perceived exploitation on employee burnout, silence, and psychological withdrawal

Factors affecting supervisors' enactment of interpersonal fairness: the interactive relationship between their managers' informational fairness and supervisors' sense of power

Managerial trickle-down effects refer to the tendency for supervisors to treat their subordinates in ways analogous to how they have been treated by their own bosses. Whereas trickle-down effects are widely documented, including in the justice literature, less is known about the conditions under which they are more versus less likely to emerge. Across two studies we examined how supervisors’ tendencies to exhibit interpersonal fairness are interactively determined by the informational fairness they receive from managers above them and supervisors' sense of power. Study 1 was a multi-source survey conducted in organizational settings. Study 2 was an experiment in which we manipulated the informational fairness that supervisors received from managers and supervisors’ sense of power. The results of both studies showed that the positive relationship between the informational fairness received from managers and supervisors’ enactment of interpersonal fairness was stronger among supervisors who had a lower sense of power. This interactive effect did not emerge on supervisors’ enactment of other forms of fairness (distributive, procedural and informational), consistent with prior theory and research showing that interpersonal fairness allows for greater discretion than other forms of fairness. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed as are limitations and suggestions for future research

Retribution and Restoration as General Orientations Towards Justice

We proposed two distinct understandings of what justice means to victims and what its restoration entails that are reflected in individual-level justice orientations. Individuals with a retributive orientation conceptualize justice as the unilateral imposition of just deserts against the offender. In contrast, individuals with a restorative orientation conceptualize justice as achieving a renewed consensus about the shared values violated by the offence. Three studies showed differential relations between these two justice orientations and various individual-level values/ideologies and predicted unique variance in preferences for concrete justice-restoring interventions, judicial processes and abstract justice restoration goals. The pattern of results lends validity to the understanding of justice as two distinct conceptualizations, a distinction that provides much needed explanation for divergent preferences for injustice responses