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Intentional negative behaviors, under their various conceptualizations, have developed into a major area of study in the literature. Previous research has provided many interesting and valuable examinations of this phenomenon, examining a variety of factors such as individual differences, exogenous influences and affective and cognitive reactions to experienced events. Most of these approaches, however, have been limited by relatively static conceptualizations of intentional negative behaviors and their antecedents. After reviewing the previous literature, we offer an alternative, dynamic view of discrete episodes of said behaviors, and outline the ways in which this approach could help advance the field and address some of the limitations of previous research.

Service recovery strategies have been identified as a critical factor in the success of service organizations. This study develops a conceptual framework to investigate how specific service recovery strategies influence the emotional, cognitive and negative behavioral responses of consumers, as well as how emotion and cognition influence negative behavior. Understanding the impact of specific service recovery strategies will allow service providers to more deliberately and intentionally engage in strategies that result in positive organizational outcomes. This study was conducted using a 2×2 between-subjects quasi-experimental design. The results suggest that service recovery has a significant impact on emotion, cognition and negative behavior. Similarly, satisfaction, negative emotion and positive emotion all influence negative behavior but distributive justice has no effect.

Research on perceptions of organizational politics has mostly explored the negative aspects and detrimental outcomes for organizations and employees. Responding to recent calls in the literature for a more balanced treatment, we expand on how positive and negative organizational politics perceptions are perceived as stressors and affect employee outcomes through their influence on the social environment. We propose that employees appraise positive and negative organization politics perceptions as either challenge or hindrance stressors, to which they respond with engagement and disengagement as problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies. Specifically, employees who appraise the negative politics perceptions as a hindrance, use both problem- and emotion-focused coping, which entails one of three strategies: (1) decreasing their engagement, (2) narrowing the focus of their engagement, or (3) disengaging. Although these strategies result in negative outcomes for the organization, employees’ coping leads to their positive well-being. In contrast, employees appraising positive politics perceptions as a challenge stressor use problem-focused coping, which involves increasing their engagement to reap the perceived benefits of a positive political environment. Yet, positive politics perceptions may also be appraised as a hindrance stressor in certain situations, and, therefore lead employees to apply emotion-focused coping wherein they use a disengagement strategy. By disengaging, they deal with the negative effects of politics perceptions, resulting in positive well-being. Thus, our framework suggests an unexpected twist to the stress process of politics perceptions as a strain-provoking component of employee work environments.

Abusive supervision is associated with many detrimental consequences. In this theory-review chapter, we extend the abusive supervision literature in two ways. First, we argue that more attention needs to be given to the emotion contagion processes between the leader and followers. More specifically, leaders’ negative affect can lead to followers’ experiences of negative affect, thereby influencing followers’ perception of abusive supervision. Second, we explore how employees draw upon their cognitive prototypes of an ideal leader or Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs) to evaluate leader behaviors. In this regard, we argue that ILTs can influence the (negative) emotional contagion process between the leaders’ negative affect and followers’ perception of abusive supervision. In our proposed model, leaders’ expressions of negative affect, via emotional contagion, influence followers’ negative affect, perception of abusive supervision, and two behavioral responses: affect- and judgment-driven. The negative emotional contagion process between the leader and followers also differs depending on followers’ susceptibility to emotional contagion and their ILTs. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our model.

During team meetings, expressing negativity about other team members’ ideas and contributions – that is, negative disagreements – can derail team processes and harm team productivity. If team members want to improve their meetings and reduce negativity, which aspects are relevant starting points? This chapter discusses the complexity of this question by considering the interplay of team attributes, individual characteristics, and verbal interaction dynamics that may evoke negative disagreements in meetings. To this end, this chapter relies on existing behavioral and survey data of 259 employees nested in 43 team meetings that were analyzed using statistical discourse analysis. The results of this analysis highlight several potential starting points for reducing negativity in workplace meetings. First, we discovered that team attributes matter, as teams with a lower overall level of job satisfaction were more likely to experience negative disagreements during their meetings. Second, at the individual level, we found a significant gender effect such that women were more likely than men to start negative disagreements. Third, individual team members reporting lower organizational trust were more likely to start negative disagreements. Finally, counter to previous work on interaction dynamics during meetings, we could not identify specific verbal behaviors that triggered negative disagreements. In terms of practical implications, we discuss how managers can increase organizational trust and job satisfaction (e.g., through ensuring justice and improving job design) in order to encourage more positive meeting interactions.

Employees today face a number of threats to their work and financial well-being (i.e., economic stress). In an aim to provide an agenda and theoretical framework for research on multilevel outcomes of economic stress, the current chapter considers how employees’ economic stress gives rise to emergent outcomes and how these emergent outcomes feed back to influence well-being. Specifically, we draw from Conservation of Resources theory to integrate competing theoretical perspectives with regard to employees’ behavioral responses to economic stress. As employees’ behaviors influence those with whom they interact, we propose that behavioral responses to economic stress have implications for group-level well-being (e.g., interpersonal climate, cohesion) and group-level economic stress. In turn, group-level and individual-level behavioral outcomes influence well-being and economic stress in a multilevel resource loss cycle. We discuss potential opportunities and challenges associated with testing this model as well as how it could be used to examine higher-level emergent effects (e.g., at the organizational level).

We report on research that investigated the emotional mediation of leader behavior on observers’ affinity for the members of a leader's group. Participants (N=181) read a vignette describing the positive, negative, or neutral behaviors of a national leader, and the approval or disapproval of that leader's followers for that behavior. Results revealed that liking (i.e., allophilia) for the leader's followers decreased when the group leader behaved negatively and group members expressed approval for their leader. These changes in allophilia were mediated by the amount of anger experienced by the participant. Implications of these findings for future work on leadership and intergroup relations are discussed.

Research has overwhelmingly focused on the positive side of leadership in the past. However, research into negative aspects of leadership is picking up pace. This chapter will provide an overview of two prominent aspects of negative leadership, namely, abusive supervision and laissez-faire leadership. Research has shown that both types of leadership have significant negative consequences both for organisations as a whole as well as individual followers. Examples include lower job satisfaction, stress, as well as lowered performances and a higher likelihood of counter-productive work behaviour. Both abusive supervision and laissez-faire researchers acknowledge that these leadership styles take effect through the perception of followers. That is, they consider that the same behaviour can be interpreted differently by different followers and will, hence, lead to different follower-related outcomes. Abusive supervision and laissez-faire are, however, very different in terms of the actual leader behaviours described. While abusive supervision is a style that is actively destructive, laissez-faire is destructive via lack of support for followers' goal achievement. We end the chapter with an outlook for future research, notably an attempt to systematise future research into destructive leadership with respect to the different forms it can take.

Proactivity is a type of goal-directed work behavior in which individuals actively take charge of situations to bring about future change in themselves or their organization. In this chapter, we draw on goal-regulation research to review conceptual and empirical evidence that elucidates some of the complex links of affective experience and employee proactivity. We identify the different ways in which affective experience influences different stages of proactivity, including employees’ efforts in setting a proactive goal (envisioning), preparing to implement their proactive goal (planning), implementing their proactive goal (enacting), and engaging in learning from their proactive goal process (reflecting). Overall, our review suggests an important, positive role of high-activated positive trait affectivity and moods in motivating proactivity across multiple goal stages, as compared to low-activated positive affectivity and moods. The role of negative affect is mixed, and likely depends on both its valence and the stage of proactivity that is being considered. We identify a lack of research on the role of discrete emotions for employee proactivity. We discuss future avenues for research, particularly the roles of intra- and inter-personal emotion regulation for proactivity and of affective embeddedness of proactive processes in the social environment of organizations.