![]() In the end, what stood out to Wang and her colleagues most was a noticeable tendency toward reciprocal, eye-for-an-eye forms of retaliation across all the different aspects of misconduct they studied. The researchers weren't sure what patterns would emerge but expected to see a mixture of escalation, de-escalation, and reciprocation, depending on the circumstance. For instance, they could find out if severe misconduct, like sexual harassment, was more likely to yield an escalating response than mild misconduct, like gossiping or if highly active forms of demeaning behavior, like bullying from a boss, might yield more passive responses, such as calling in sick. They also looked at the target of the behavior-whether it was directed back at the original instigator or displaced onto someone else ("you hurt me and I kick my dog," as Wang describes it).Īnalyzing these dimensions separately allowed the researchers to develop a nuanced portrait of negative workplace behavior and its aftermath. The team sorted the data from these published studies into groups, determining whether each behavior was mild, moderate, or severe, as well as whether it was passive (e.g., not showing up for work), active (e.g., screaming at a colleague), or a bit of both (e.g., griping with coworkers behind the boss's back). The researchers only analyzed cases where more than one person was involved and where they could identify a clear target, whether that target was another person (as in cases of bullying or sabotage) or the organization itself (as in cases of absenteeism or workplace theft).įor each instance of negative behavior, the researchers were also able to determine whether an individual was the perpetrator or the target of the behavior, since this information had been captured by the original studies they aggregated. In the end, the team's sample, drawn from 207 studies (most of which collected data via surveys), included nearly 97,000 individuals and represented a diverse pool of industries, including healthcare, the service sector, and government. This involved trawling through hundreds of journal articles about workplace misconduct and identifying the ones that captured usable information about negative workplace behavior by one party and how another party responded. Whitson of the University of California, Los Angeles. ![]() O'Boyle of Indiana University, Joongseo Kim of Pennsylvania State University–Erie, and Jennifer A. Greco of Oklahoma State University, Ernest H. To find out, Wang teamed up with Lindsey M. The researchers hoped to shed light on a long-standing debate in their field: when people are treated poorly, do they respond in kind ("an eye for an eye"), do they escalate the bad behavior, or do they try to de-escalate and wind it down? Wang and her colleagues wanted to capture that broader social context and understand how the targets of workplace behavior respond to a provocation. ![]() It involves at least two people: if there's a bully at the office, there's also someone being bullied. Yet in reality, some of the most intractable workplace misconduct isn't a solitary pursuit. These studies have mostly focused on individuals, identifying personality or attitudinal trends among the bad apples who perpetrate the offenses. ![]() There is a lot of existing research on so-called negative workplace behavior, a category that includes severe misconduct, like sexual harassment, and more quotidian transgressions, like browsing Amazon when you should be finishing a project. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. ![]()
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