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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.

Peace support operations and the role of the United Nations is getting important in changing the global power system. But generally peace support missions are creating new problems while trying to solve the original ones. In this presentation I will try to examine the relative effectiveness of the UN in the military observer missions, which is the most common type of UN peace support operations. The UN Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) is used to show their relative effectiveness in the current world system by means of differentiating the problems they are facing. After showing the common problems, I will give special emphasis to the genuine problems of UNOMIG. First of all we have to take a brief look at the origins of military observer missions. During the long Cold War, the UN had to engage in conflict resolution/management in a world widely divided between two superpowers. The Security Council (SC) suffered lots of problems to handle conflicts without jeopardising the interests of the superpowers. So in most of the cases (except Korea and Congo) the SC did not authorise the necessary military forces to the conflict areas. Instead the SC preferred to send interpositional forces with light arms or military observers without arms after getting the consent of the conflicting parties. Currently we are calling this approach traditional peacekeeping. By experiences gained on the ground and in the SC it was understood that the best and easiest reaction is establishing a UN military observer mission (UNMOM) (Mackinlay, 1996, pp. 9–11; British Army, 1995, pp. 1–2/2–7). According to this limited and conservative logic this process must follow standard steps: First an armed conflict between two states; second a stalemate that nobody is able to defeat the other side completely; third conflicting states ask the UN to enforce a ceasefire; fourth the SC authorises neutral military observers to monitor a ceasefire and to achieve some other limited objectives, according their mandate; fifth conflicting states try to reach a peaceful solution by diplomatic negotiations with the help of the UN; sixth agreement is reached and end of UNMOM. In short, the duty of the military observers is to monitor the ceasefire and the restrictions agreed to by both parties in a geographically limited area for a limited time. But in reality, diplomatic negotiations often do not provide fast and lasting solutions. UNMOMs have remained and temporary missions turned into permanent ones. The answer to the question why is that they are economically cheap operations and politically easier to maintain than to remove. Most of the UNMOMs that were established in different continents are still going on without an end in sight (Brahimi et al., 2000, p. 3).

Most anger research has adopted a within-person view, focusing on the effects of experienced anger on a person's feelings, cognition, and behavior. Less research has examined the effects of anger expressed by one person on other people in the workplace. We review available literature on the interpersonal effects of anger and propose a theoretical framework that addresses two main questions (1) What mechanisms can explain the effects of observed anger on other people? and (2) What factors may strengthen or attenuate these effects? We propose that observed anger affects observers’ performance via emotional and cognitive routes that are interrelated, and that this effect depends on the properties of the expressed anger, the situation in which the anger occurs, and the task being performed by the observer.

Self-report questionnaires are the predominant method used in human resource management (HRM) research to assess employees’ work-related psychological constructs (e.g., processes, states, and attributes). However, this method is associated with significant shortcomings, including the introduction of self-serving bias and common method variance when used exclusively. In this chapter, the authors challenge the assumption that individuals themselves are the only accurate source of the self-focused information collected in HRM research. Instead, the authors propose that other-ratings – ratings of a target individual that are provided by a workplace observer, such as a coworker, supervisor, or subordinate – can accurately assess commonly measured work-related psychological constructs. The authors begin by explaining the advantages of other-ratings for HRM research and practice, reviewing the history of other-ratings and how they emerged in the personality and person-perception literature, and outlining how they have been used in HRM research to date. Then, the authors build upon Funder’s (1995) realistic accuracy model to develop a theoretical argument detailing why workplace others should be able to accurately judge how another employee thinks and feels about work. Next, the authors highlight existing evidence in the literature on the accuracy of other-ratings and present the results of a preliminary meta-analysis on the ability of other-ratings to predict self-ratings of work-related psychological constructs. Finally, the authors discuss potential moderators of other-rating accuracy and reflect on a number of practical considerations for researchers looking to use other-ratings in their own work. The authors intend for this chapter to meaningfully contribute to the larger conversation on HRM research methods. Other-ratings are a simple, yet powerful, addition to the methodological toolkit of HRM researchers that can increase flexibility in research design and improve the overall quality of research.

Individuals are often stigmatized by virtue of their status on various dimensions and as a consequence, they typically evoke negative cognitions, affect, and emotions among observers. In addition, they are often the targets of both access and treatment discrimination in organizations. Thus, we present a model of the cognitive, affective, and cultural influences on stigmatization in organizations, detail how stigmatization affects human resource management processes and practices, and consider strategies that can be used to reduce the problems faced by stigmatized individuals in organizations.

This chapter considers how observers can effectively and safely engage with unethical organizational behaviors. Engagement methods need to be aligned with the situational contexts of specific cases. Micro-level individual, meso-level organizational, and macro-level environmental contextual obstacles to effective and safe engagement are considered. Five types of observer ethics engagement methods are considered in the context of specific cases and contextual obstacles. Engagement methods considered are as follows: (1) evocation and framing of dialogic engagement as consistent with the identity, vision, and values of the organization; (2) win–win incentive and ethics networking methods; (3) internal and external whistle-blowing methods; (4) if the observer is in a position of organizational power, top-down forcing methods; and (5) linking of observed unethical behaviors with strong external social movements.

Budget decision-makers are forced at times to assign budgets that deviate substantially from budget participants’ requests. In these instances, budget participants likely interpret their budgetary involvement as lacking influence and perhaps as pseudo-participative. This experimental study examined two situational factors that may affect perceptions of pseudo-participation: budget favorability (receiving a much better or much worse budget than requested) and disclosure of budget intention (the decision-maker discloses or does not disclose a preliminary budget before the budget decision, with the final budget exactly matching the preliminary budget). As hypothesized, budget participants had a self-serving tendency to discount pseudo-participation as the cause of low influence when they received a favorable budget. However, contrary to a hypothesized effect, budget participants did not have a self-serving tendency to inflate pseudo-participation as the cause of low influence when they received an unfavorable budget. Instead, they formed strong, unbiased pseudo-participation perceptions. Also contrary to a hypothesized effect, the budget decision-maker's disclosure of an intended budget, which should have provided clear indications of an insincere request for budget input, did not increase perceptions of pseudo-participation. Budget outcomes that indicate low influence may evoke such strong perceptions of pseudo-participation as to override other information that suggests pseudo-participation.

Still recently, one could read that social constructivism as a paradigm in sociology has yet generated no substantive theory of globalization (Risse, 2007). The argument was that even though social constructivism could certainly contribute to our understanding of globalization, notably by stressing the role of language and cultural norms in the organization of collective activities on a world scale, it could not satisfactorily account in its own terms for the entire phenomena under examination, due to the fact that globalization is not solely or even primarily about language and cultural norms. The exposition of such a position in the academic literature is worth mentioning, indeed even significant, if only for the reason that it occurred in a collection of essays edited by David Held and Anthony McGrew, who have done so much over the past decade to establish globalization studies as a solid research field, all at once theoretically sophisticated and empirically informed, with the publication of a long series of books on Global transformations (Held, McGrew, Golblatt, & Perraton, 1999; Held, 2004a, 2004b; Held & McGrew, 2002, 2003, 2007a, 2007b; Held & Kaya, 2007; Held & Koenig-Archibugi, 2003; see also McGrew & Lewis, 1992; Held, 1995). In spite of such credentials, the present article aims directly at challenging and overcoming this position by developing what would be the basis or the framework for a full-fledged social constructivist theory of globalization. Admittedly, this requires us to redefine globalization in a fundamental manner. Such a transformation is possible when one turns toward a new kind of social constructivism: Niklas Luhmann's radical constructivism as grounded in his systems theory (Luhmann, 2002; see also Luhmann, 1982a, 1989, 1990, 1995, 2000a, 2000b). I contend that globalization is neither a process of social change nor a historical set of forces of transformation having to do with the way human beings shape space through their collective activities; rather, globalization is one of contemporary society's self-descriptions.

Workplace mavericks are often labeled as non-conformists. They are perceived to be the employees who disregard organizational policies and procedures, and who invite huge risks in the pursuit of goals that sit outside what the organization dictates as the core business or practice. While this may be accurate to a degree, it is not the complete story. Guided by recent conceptualizations of non-conformity and positive deviance, this qualitative study interviewed 27 observers of mavericks (observer-types) in the workplace, and 28 interviews with mavericks (maverick-types). Results highlight that while maverick individuals do challenge organizational norms, they do so for the benefit of others, including the organization. Additionally, they are not wildcard non-conformists as they do in fact conform. However, they are conforming positively to higher level hyper-norms or organizational goals, and therefore operate in what could be termed as bounded non-conformity. Understanding the form that this bounded non-conformity takes is key for organizations to mitigate perceptions of the risk posed by maverick individuals, while maximizing the rewards that maverick employees can offer to organizations, especially for informing ideas and plans around more radical change and innovation. In this way, organizations can benefit from the numerous and unique contributions of mavericks in the workplace, such as innovative, unorthodox, and out-of-the-box thinking, while at the same time still ensuring the effective governance and risk management of the organization.

In the field of behavioral disabilities, systematic direct observation (SDO) has been an integral tool for describing and explaining relationships between student and teacher behavior in authentic classroom settings. However, this method of measurement can be resource-intensive and presents a series of complex decisions for investigators. The purpose of this chapter is to review a series of critical decisions investigators must make when developing SDO protocols to address their research questions. After describing each decision point and its relevance to the measurement system, we identify trends and special considerations in the field of behavioral disabilities with respect to each decision. We organize content according to deciding what to measure, deciding how to measure it, and critical steps to prevent system breakdowns. Finally, we identify avenues for research to further the impact of SDO in the field of behavioral disabilities.