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The current management literature suggests that when employees engage in wrongdoing, managers typically respond with punishment. The emerging moral repair literature suggests an alternative to punishment: a reparative response that focuses on repairing harm and restoring damaged relationships. However, little is currently known about restorative managerial responses, including why managers respond to employee wrongdoing in a reparative versus punitive manner. The purpose of this paper is to examine a variety of cognitive and emotional influences on this managerial decision.

This study used a scenario-based survey methodology. The authors gathered data from 894 managers in sales and financial services contexts to test a set of hypotheses regarding individual-level influences on managers’ punitive versus restorative responses.

This study found that managers’ restorative justice orientation, retributive justice orientation, social considerations (e.g. when employees are relatively interdependent versus independent), instrumental considerations (e.g. when the offender is highly valuable to the organization) and feelings of anger influenced their reparative versus punitive responses.

Data are cross-sectional, so causality inferences should be approached with caution. Another potential limitation is common method bias due to single-source and single-wave data.

The findings of this study show that managers often opt for a restorative response to workplace transgressions, and this study surfaces a variety of reasons why managers choose a restorative response instead of a punitive response.

This study focuses on social order and expectations within the workplace. This is important to victims, offenders, observers, managers and other stakeholders. This study seeks to emphasize the importance of social factors, a shared social identity, social bonds and other relationships within this manuscript. This is an important component of organizational-focused restorative justice research.

This is the first study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to explicitly test individual-level influences on managers’ reparative versus punitive responses to employee wrongdoing.

The authors investigate the contributions of social capital (SC) dimensions (bridging, bonding and linking) in crowdfunding campaigns by comparing the dynamics of agri-food businesses with those of two other sectors – cultural and technological.

The authors develop linear regressions on a proprietary data set of 5,290 projects launched on the Italian platform “Produzionidalbasso.com”, from 2014 to 2020.

The authors’ findings suggest that combining the three social capital dimensions (bridging, bonding and linking) has a more substantial overall effect on the number of backers involved in agri-food projects than in cultural and technological projects. Agri-food entrepreneurs effectively mobilize all resources embedded in the SC dimensions and therefore create the conditions to develop new ties that financially support the project.

Agri-food entrepreneurs may benefit from those results improving their funding strategies. Therefore, agri-food entrepreneurs can explore and exploit the instruments available on the CFD platform – video and rewards associated with the campaign – gaining more benefit from the backers involved compared with other project categories.

The study proposes a broader perspective regarding SC that encompasses the proponent, the company and the campaign with three different types of ties: bonding, bridging and linking. These SC dimensions can differently shape diverse sectors and this eclectic configuration can differentiate the effects of SC in crowdfunding campaigns. This study pinpoints how crowdfunding determinants change, based on project categories.