When our co-workers share their unfair experiences, do we believe them? Perceptions of workplace fairness are negatively related to perceived credibility of coworkers’ claims of injustice

Prior research shows that when observing a co-worker being treated unfairly, employees who are third parties to the incident feel angry and want to punish the perpetrator. However, research has focused on situations in which third parties have unambiguous information about the unfair incident, such as when they witnessed the incident directly. I argue that in many situations, third parties merely hear a co-worker’s claim about an unfair experience, which often provides ambiguous information about the incident. To compensate for ambiguity, I argue that third parties rely on their perceptions of their organization’s overall fairness when interpreting a claim, such that the more they perceive the organization to be fair, the less credible they perceive the claim to be. Across five studies using correlational and experimental designs, I found that third parties’ overall justice perceptions negatively affected their perceptions of claim credibility. In turn, perceived claim credibility was positively related to subsequent reactions, including anger and intentions to punish the accused and support the claimant. Consequently, the more third parties perceived their organization to be fair, the less they reacted to a claim of unfairness. However, the negative effect of overall justice on perceived claim credibility was reduced when third parties had unambiguous information about the incident. Although prior research has focused on beneficial effects of employees’ justice perceptions, I show that there can also be harmful effects. Thus, even if an organization is generally fair, its leaders must remain vigilant to ensure that victims of injustice receive proper support

Goal-setting and unethical behavior: The journey toward the goal matters

Unethical behavior in the workplace causes harm to organizations and has a widespread impact on society. Recent studies show that difficult and specific goals can lead to unethical behavior. Specifically, studies show that individuals are more likely to lie about their performance when they receive a difficult and specific goal compared to when they receive an easy or vague goal. Moreover, they are more likely to do so when they miss the goal by a small margin compared to when they miss the goal by a large margin. However, decades of research has demonstrated that assigning a difficult and specific goal to employees leads to higher performance than assigning an easy or vague goal. This poses a dilemma regarding the use of difficult and specific goals: How can organizations improve employees’ performance without also increasing unethical behavior? Drawing on Control theory (Carver & Scheier, 1998) and Gestalt framework of dynamic experiences (Ariely & Carmon, 2003), we predicted that among individuals whose goal progress decelerates, missing the goal by a small margin (compared to a large margin) would have a weak effect on the extent to which they lie about their performance. On the other hand, we predicted that among individuals whose rate of goal progress is constant or accelerates over time, individuals who miss the goal by a small margin would be more likely to lie than individuals who miss the goal by a large margin. In two experimental studies, we found some support for our hypotheses

Geographic Variability of Sex-Linked Loci in the Japanese Brown Frog, Rana japonica

Rana japonica has been reported to be of the male heterogametic type in the sex-determining mechanism. In order to detect the sex-linked loci in R. japonica, the linkage relationships between the sex-determining genes and 11 loci controlling eight enzymes and one blood protein were examined in 48 crosses involving 30 males heterozygous at these loci from 10 local populations by using starch-gel electrophoresis. The Ab locus was found to be linked with the sex-determining genes in the Munakata, Yamaguchi, Ochi, Saiki, Saijo, Sahara and Mobara populations, whereas the MDH-B, MPI, Pep-A and Pep-C loci were not linked with the latter in 23 crosses involving 16 heterozygous males from the seven populations. The MPI locus was linked with the sex-determining genes in the Ichinoseki and Toyama populations, whereas the Ab locus was not linked with the latter in 11 crosses involving eight heterozygous males from two populations. In the Akita population, none of the Ab, AAT-B, ADA, α-GDH, LDH-B, ME-A, ME-B and MPI loci was linked with the sex-determining genes in 14 crosses involving six heterozygous males. Thus, it is evident that the locus linked with the sex-determining gene differs with the populations