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This case was developed from interviews the author held with Nathan Baumeister, the protagonist in the case and Towny CEO; Hannah Franzen, a Towny marketing employee discussed in the case; and Mallory Franzen, Hannah’s sister-in-law and the company representative for Boomn, the digital marketing agency discussed in the case. In addition, secondary research on the USA retail industry was performed by the author. The case was class-tested four times by the author, with Hannah Franzen and Mallory Franzen initially visiting as case protagonists. This resulted in the case of refinements based on student discussion.

Towny: A new business model for a mobile economy shares the context and issues surrounding CEO Nathan Baumeister in the spring of 2018 at Towny, a unique business helping local businesses connect with their consumers over mobile devices. The company began going to market based on the vision of its owner and Nathan’s boss, Don Shafer. It had quickly approached local business clients and consumers in five key markets. The purpose of the case is to allow students the opportunity to discuss key new venture creation concepts and scenarios such as customer value proposition, competitive advantage and digital marketing.

This case was developed to be used in an undergraduate course in entrepreneurship. The particular course, new venture finance: the entrepreneur’s perspective, teaches the general subject of entrepreneurial finance through financial models such as free cash flow and valuation, case discussions with entrepreneurs visiting as facilitators and protagonists and business concept planning and forecasting. This case helps train students on how to incorporate online marketing costs into their business concept plans. Relevant courses and topics also include small business management and entrepreneurial financial management.

We present a model of organizational monitoring that integrates organizational justice and information privacy. Specifically, we adopt the position that the formation of invasiveness and unfairness attitudes is a goal-driven process. We employ cybernetic control theory and identity theory to describe how monitoring systems affect one's ability to maintain a positive self-concept. Monitoring provides a particularly powerful cue that directs attention to self-awareness. People draw on fairness and privacy relevant cues inherent in monitoring systems and embedded in monitoring environments (e.g., justice climate) to evaluate their identities. Discrepancies between actual and desired personal and social identities create distress, motivating employees to engage in behavioral self-regulation to counteract potentially threatening monitoring systems. Organizational threats to personal identity goals lead to increased invasiveness attitudes and a commitment to protect and enhance the self. Threats to social identity lead to increased unfairness attitudes and lowered commitment to one's organization. Implications for theory and research on monitoring, justice, and privacy are discussed along with practical implications.

Purpose – This chapter reviews the authors’ research on group procedural justice and group-serving behavior. It makes the case that fairness and unfairness can both motivate group-serving behavior; the former makes group members feel good about their identity, leading them to “reward” the group, and the latter indicates a group shortcoming, leading members to “repair” the group.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter describes several studies published elsewhere. Correlational research with employees and students examines the relationship between group procedural fairness and group members’ positive affect, which should translate into group-serving behavior. Experimental research with students investigates whether group procedural unfairness can result in group-serving behavior (measured via self-report and observed helping). Complementary findings from other authors are briefly described and discussed in support of a developed theoretical model of group procedural justice and group-serving behavior.

Findings – Group procedural fairness was more strongly related to arousing positive affect for strongly identified group members. Separately, strongly identified group members engaged in more group-serving behavior when their group had unfair rather than fair procedures.

Research limitations/implications – Possible boundary conditions for the motivating effects of unfairness are discussed (e.g., group permeability, time frame, and anonymity of unfairness). Suggestions for future research are proposed (e.g., examine the effect of justice information on group-serving behavior when group members can also modify group procedures).

Practical implications – Better understanding the effects of group procedural unfairness should influence how organizations and societies promote group-serving behavior.

Originality/value – Research on the motivating effects of both group procedural fairness and unfairness are synthesized into one theoretical model.

Processes of legitimacy and justice pervade work organizations. Here we focus on how legitimacy (collective sources of support for an authority) and procedural justice (use of fair procedures) affect how individuals interpret and respond to situations involving unfair outcomes such as underpayment. We draw upon the legitimacy perspective of Walker and Zelditch and the procedural justice approach of Tyler to develop two new models, one in which the two factors constitute objective and independent contextual elements and one in which perceptions of legitimacy and procedural justice are reciprocal. Both models have implications for understanding fairness and compliance in organizations.

Respect is an important indicator of intragroup status, and it can influence within-group behavior. Being respected by other group members indicates a positive standing within the group that is relevant to two important identity concerns: belongingness and social reputation. Belongingness refers to the extent to which a person feels included in the group, and social reputation refers to how other in-group members evaluate a person. We review a series of studies that show that respect indeed communicates information relevant to these identity concerns, and as such influences a person's sense of affiliation, self-esteem, and cooperation (all variables considered to be important for the viability of groups). In addition, we also discuss whether the source of respect (i.e., peers vs. authority), culture, and group size matter in influencing these group-related variables. Finally, some implications for research on groups are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact on employee voice from formal vs informal sources of procedural justice: group responsiveness and interactional justice, and to test how this impact may vary according to employees’ traditionality.

Dyadic data were collected from 261 employees and their supervisors. Results of the analyses offered support for the hypothesized moderated mediation model where group responsiveness and interactional justice would influence employee voice through enhanced organization-based self-esteem, and where such influence would be moderated by traditionality.

The findings showed that when there was a high level of group responsiveness, low traditionalists spoke up more, but when there was a high level of interactional justice, high traditionalists spoke up more.

By adopting the group engagement model, this study presented an alternative to the conventional perspective from uncertainty management theory about justice and voice, and tended to the neglect of fairness as an antecedent of voice by investigating how employees’ engagement in voice can be affected by their experience with different sources of procedural fairness information.

Conceptualizing trust alone or as the starting point for understanding both trust and distrust is insufficient. Therefore, this chapter focuses on the construction of phenotypic trustscapes and distrustscapes that permit an abstract exploration of the concepts of trust and distrust using societal and dyadic relationships and perceptions of the individual as the units of analysis. For theoretical understanding of trust and distrust, it uses social and evolutionary biologic multi-level theory. This chapter builds on the existing trust literature in three ways: (1) by triangulating on trust and distrust through the use of a number of research methodologies; (2) by placing trust and distrust in value orientation theory and models; and (3) by extricating trust and distrust from reciprocity constructs, and placing them into separate phenotypes: trustscapes and distrustscapes. These efforts show that both trust and distrust are naturally occurring phenomena, with one or the other predominant in specific contexts. The chapter includes scenarios in Japan, Bulgaria, and Indonesia to demonstrate how micro- and macro-level examples of trustscapes and distrustscapes function.

Sociologists, social psychologists, and organizational theorists alike have shown a great deal of interest in the concept of social capital. To a large extent, this interest has been fueled by accumulating evidence that social capital plays a vital role in the development of more cooperative relationships within groups and organizations. Inspired by this evidence, a primary goal of the present paper is to examine more systematically the psychological underpinnings of social capital within contemporary workplaces. Drawing on social identity theory and related theories on the self, this paper develops a framework for conceptualizing how individuals’ psychological identification with a workgroup enhances their willingness to engage in behaviors that contribute to the creation of social capital within that workgroup. The paper reviews empirical evidence in favor of the framework, and draws out theoretical and applied organizational implications of the framework.

The purpose of this paper is to review the “state of the art” in research on police legitimacy. The authors consider two bodies of theory and empirical research on police legitimacy: one rooted in social psychology and concerned with individual attitudes, and the other based on organizational institutionalism. The authors contrast the theories, discuss the methods with which propositions have been examined, and take stock of the empirical evidence. The authors then turn to a direct comparison of the theories and their predictions.

Critical review and comparison of two bodies of literature.

Police legitimacy is a phenomenon that can be properly understood only when it is addressed at both individual and organizational levels. A large body of social psychological research on police legitimacy has been conducted at the individual level, though it has dwelled mainly on attitudes, and the empirical evidence on the relationships of attitudes to behavior is weak. A much smaller body of research on organizational legitimacy in policing has accumulated, and it appears to have promise for advancing our understanding of police legitimacy.

The understanding of police legitimacy can be deepened by the juxtaposition of these two bodies of theory and research.

The vast majority of contemporary social scientists have distanced themselves from moral reflection and the academic disciplines that engage in it. Throughout his long career Philip Selznick took a different path, engaging deeply with the moral content of the concepts he employed. This paper argues that he had good reasons to do so. Value neutrality in social research can fatally sever inquiry’s connection to the practical concerns that originally motivated it, and it can distort our understanding of those concerns by recasting them in a scientific mold. To make this case I draw from a long tradition of philosophical thought about the relationship between facts and values, and I illustrate it by examining the limitations of recent social science research about procedural justice in organizations and the order maintenance function of the police.