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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.

Purpose – To develop a new model of restorative reparation that attempts to capture the dynamic role of shared identity perceptions.

Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on recent advances in restorative justice theory (Wenzel, Okimoto, Feather, & Platow, 2008), we explore the theoretical proposition that a greater understanding of the identity relations between victims, offenders, and the groups in which they are embedded is key to understanding a victim's underlying motives toward justice, and thus, predicting when victims will react favorably to restorative justice processes and prefer them over traditional retributive justice interventions.

Findings – We argue that a perceived shared identity between the victim and the offender determines the extent to which the victim understands the transgression as requiring a revalidation of the rules, values, or morals undermined by the offense. Moreover, we propose that these identity relations are dynamic in that they both affect and are affected by the experience of injustice. Thus, identity is also shaped by the transgression itself through, inter alia, processes associated with positive social identity maintenance. Importantly, these shifts in identity determine how injustice victims are likely to respond to constructive approaches to conflict resolution such as restorative justice.

Originality/value – We offer a series of testable hypotheses aimed at engendering future research in the domain of constructive justice restoration in groups. Moreover, this work suggests that to develop effective resolution strategies, we must consider how an injustice event shapes the relations between the affected parties over time rather than simply assuming identity relations are static.

Reliance on third-party judgments are common in efforts to identify and reduce workplace sexual harassment (SH). The purpose of this paper is to identify whether a workplace emphasis on inclusion as a cultural value is related to third-party labeling of and response to an exchange between a male manager and his female subordinate.

Participants (n=308) in an online survey experiment were randomly assigned to a workplace that emphasized inclusion or one that emphasized individual achievement as a cultural value. They read a vignette describing a workplace interaction between a male manager and his female subordinate and responded to a series of questions.

Organizational emphasis on inclusion is unrelated to third-party labeling of the interaction as SH, but positively associated with labeling the female’s intention to pursue harassment charges as an overreaction, and support for the female subordinate in a claim of SH against her manager. Culture is unassociated with willingness to defend the male manager in a SH claim.

Identifying how workplace culture shapes third-party reaction to harassment can help employers use third-party witnesses and cultural value statements as tools to reduce SH.

A workplace’s cultural emphasis on inclusion is positively related to third-party support for SH victims implying the importance of workplace context in the fight against workplace SH.

The paper presents the first experimental analysis of how a workplace cultural emphasis on inclusion affects the third-party observers’ reactions to SH.

In this chapter, we examine employee prosocial rule breaking as a response to organizations’ unfair treatment of customers. Drawing on the deontic perspective and research on third-party reactions to unfairness, we suggest employees engage in customer-directed prosocial rule breaking when they believe their organizations’ policies treat customers unfairly. Additionally, we consider employee, customer, and situational characteristics that enhance or inhibit the relationship between employees’ perceptions of organizational policy unfairness and customer-directed prosocial rule breaking.

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.

Service failures usually occur in front of third-party customers. Third-party customers react emotionally and behaviorally to service failure and recovery efforts aimed at focal customers. However, there is a gap in the literature on how third-party customers react to a service failures incident and a recovery over another customer, depending on how socially close or distant they are from. This study investigates the effect of third-party customers' emotions on consumer forgiveness, negative word-of-mouth (WoM) and repatronage intentions in the service recovery process by comparing close and distant third-party customers.

This study utilizes a 2 (social distance to the focal customer: close, distant) × 2 (service recovery: yes, no) between-subjects design. The authors used a scenario-based experiment to test the proposed hypotheses. A total of 576 respondents were involved in the study.

The results from the authors' scenario-based experimental study show that positive and negative emotions felt by distant third-party customers are higher than those of close third-party customers. In addition, the effect of positive emotions on customer forgiveness is more substantial for distant third-party customers. Third, moderated-mediation analysis indicates that social distance has a moderator effect only on the relationship between positive emotions and customer forgiveness.

This study contributes to the service literature by comparing socially close and socially distant third-party customers' reactions to service failure and recovery attempts.

Organizational practitioners must often interpret accounts of workplace bullying. However, they are frequently reluctant to confirm the target's account and often fail to set effective intervention measures. Building on novel approaches in attribution theory, this study explores how causal explanations and blame pattern shape the labelling of a complaint and the subsequent recommended intervention measures.

187 Austrian human resource professionals, employee representatives and other practitioners were confronted with a fictional workplace bullying complaint including conflicting actors' accounts and diverse possible internal, relational and external causes. Since the prior low performance of a target might affect blame attributions, the previous performance ratings of the target were manipulated. Data were analysed via qualitative content analysis.

When respondents reject the complaint, they predominately identify single internal causes and blame the target, and/or trivialize the complaint as “normal conflict”. Both low and high performance of the target trigger (single) internal blame. When the complaint is supported, deontic statements and blame attributions against the perpetrator prevail; however, blame placed on the perpetrator is often discounted via multi-blame attributions towards supervisors, colleagues and the target. Structural causes were rarely mentioned. Relational attributions are infrequent and often used to trivialize the complaint. Irrespective of the attributional blame patterns, most third parties recommend “reconciliatory measures” (e.g. mediation) between the actors.

Trainings to temper single internal blaming and raise awareness of organizational intervention measures are essential.

This is the first study to investigate workplace bullying blaming patterns and organizational responses in detail.

This work describes and demonstrates a novel measurement system refered to as videometrics. Videometrics uses third-party ratings of video samples to assess individuals’ characteristics with psychometrically validated instruments of the measures of interest. Videometrics is argued to help ensure valid measurement in difficult to access subject pools, offering substantial promise for future research. This work explains the methodology and demonstrates the applicability and validity of videometrics in multiple studies in the context of a difficult to access subject pool – chief executive officers (CEOs). Finally, the applicability of the method to samples for which lack of access to individuals of interest has limited empirical investigation is discussed.

Considerable research has examined the negative consequences of customer incivility on employees (e.g. turnover intention and sabotage behavior toward the customer). However, there is scant research investigating how other customers, as observers, may react to incivility. This knowledge gap should be filled because hospitality services are often consumed in the public setting where customers can observe and be influenced by each other. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap by examining observing customers’ willingness to revisit the company following customer incivility.

Participants are American consumers recruited from a crowdsourced online panel. Two scenario-based experimental studies in the restaurant setting are conducted. Customer incivility and relationship norms (communal versus exchange) are manipulated, while relationship closeness is measured.

Study 1 shows that following fellow customer incivility (vs civility), observing customers’ intention to revisit the company was lower when they perceive a distant relationship with the employee. This intention did not differ regardless of incivility and civility when they perceive a close relationship with the employee. Study 2 shows that when observing customers perceive a communal relationship with the employee, their revisit intention was even higher following customer incivility (vs civility).

Hospitality managers need to train employees to identify signs of customer incivility and assume appropriate actions to reduce the negative consequences on observers. Hospitality managers should also communicate their expectations for respectful customer behaviors through an organization-wide campaign. Finally, hospitality businesses should foster a close relationship with their customers, particularly a communal relationship to offset the negative consequences of customer incivility on observers.

This study adds to previous research by challenging the universally negative view of customer incivility. The authors do so by examining the moderating effects of relationship closeness and norms in observer reactions to customer incivility. This study contributes to previous research drawing on script theory and deontic justice theory.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate public online consumer complaint responses from three different perspectives: the complainer, the company and third party consumers. Consumer complaint behaviour and management has been studied in various streams of literature, yet the subsequent processes triggered by a company complaint response have not been studied so far. In particular, this paper seeks to divert from examining complaint participants in isolation by recognising interrelated communication effects of complaint dialogue and public media.

Looking at credibility perceptions as a theoretical construct for measuring the utility of a complaint as well as attitude‐orientation as an evaluative moderator, the paper highlights the ambiguity of meaning transfer in an online complaint forum.

It is hypothesised that credibility and congruence in attitude orientation positively enhance complaint utility perceptions and strongly bias complaint dialogue evaluations.

The paper highlights that expected relevant results for online complaint managers and marketers alike are the inclusion of post‐complaint communication into corporate image and relationship management as well as using credibility perceptions as a benchmark for online customer satisfaction and potential positive electronic word‐of‐mouth.