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This paper presents an attribution appraisal framework for venting anger in conflict and empirically tests moderating and mediating variables previously overlooked in the literature.

This takes the form of a 2 (offender status: high or equal)×3 (target of venting: offender, third‐party, or no venting) between‐subjects factorial design. Qualitative and quantitative methods were employed.

Results showed that attributions were greater when venting was directed at a third‐party than when venting was directed to the offender. Venting to a third‐party when the offender was of equal status yielded the greatest expressed attributions of responsibility and post‐venting anger. Venting to a third‐party resulted in greater anger than not venting, whereas venting to the offender directly did not show a significant difference from not venting. In general, greater post‐venting anger was found for equal status offenders than high status offenders. Attributions of responsibility were found to mediate the relationship between target and post‐venting anger.

Greater participant gender balance and obtaining a pre‐venting anger measure would have improved the generalizabilty and rigor of the study. Future research should investigate responses to venting and additional measures of venting effectiveness.

Venting is just steaming; anger is not reduced through the act of venting. Furthermore, what is said (and thought) during venting matters.

The paper demonstrates that the target of anger expression and the status of the offender are critical factors in venting. Additionally, it highlights the importance of attributions in the venting process.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the emotion regulatory aspects of venting and use an attribution appraisal framework to investigate the differential impact on anger and emotional tone given a reinforcing or reinterpreting response.

This research uses a 2 (target: offender or third party)×2 (response type: reinterpret or reinforce) between‐subjects factorial design. Dependent variables are measured quantitatively in the form of a questionnaire.

This research supports the notion that venting may be used as an emotion regulatory strategy and highlights the importance of the reciprocal aspect of the venting interaction. In addition, this research underscores the importance of attributions in the venting process, in particular, the attributions used in responding to venting. This research shows that the response types (reinforcing or reinterpreting) as well as the identity of the target (offender or third party) are important determinants of anger and emotional tone.

This research employs an anger recall methodology. Future research should explore venting and responses in a live anger setting.

What is said in response to venting matters. Respondents should be aware of the attributions they use when responding to venting.

Venting may persist as a common practice because we “feel better” after the venting interaction not because we release anger.

The current chapter presents a qualitative analysis of the emotional and substantive content of 300 vents found on public job-related venting web sites. We leverage the related yet distinct literatures on venting, complaining, expressive writing, and computer-mediated communication to gain insight into how employees understand, communicate, and try to manage emotional experiences at work through these types of outlets. We found that employees vent about mistreatment by others, others’ incompetence or laziness, inequity, under-stimulation, and broader economic trends. In doing so, they often express anger in extreme forms involving profanity, personal attacks, and desires for retribution.

The use of information technology (IT) in the hospitality industry is driven by the need to improve and refine customer service. However, it is unlikely that new IT will be successfully implemented if employees' roles and emotions are overlooked. The purpose of this study is to examine the interplay of negative emotions (anger and fear), coping strategies (venting anger and psychological distancing), perceptions of an IT innovation and intention toward adopting it.

A research model is developed based on the cognitive appraisal theory of emotion, coping theory and innovation diffusion theory. An online survey was conducted among employees working for hotels that had deployed a new reservation system, and 234 responses were collected.

The results indicate that employees' negative emotions (anger and fear) have negative and significant effects on their perceptions of adopting a new reservation system through coping strategies (i.e. venting anger and psychological distancing). Furthermore, employees' perceptions of adopting an innovative reservation system have a positive effect on their adoption intention toward the system.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research to address the impact of distinct emotions on IT innovation adoption, as well as explaining the relation between affective and cognitive effects. The findings demonstrate the importance of examining negative emotions in IT innovation adoption. In addition, the model developed in this study confirms that an appraisal tendency approach better specifies the conditions under which different emotions are triggered to predict and explain how emotions relate to IT use through adaptation behaviors when compared with a valence-based approach.

This study aims to focus on the motivation of service customers to create user-generated content (UGC) after a negative service experience. In examining this relationship, the moderating role of “extraversion” personality trait is also taken into consideration. Furthermore, the paper examines how differently motivated service customers react to a firm’s service recovery strategies, whilst insights into the relationship between UGC creation and specific online platform usage are also provided.

Structural Equation Modeling is used to test the conceptual model, based on an empirical dataset collected from an online survey research of 239 service customers. The dataset pertains to international travellers and their UGC behaviour after a negative travel experience.

Altruistic, vengeance and economic motivations are strong drivers for UGC creation after a negative service experience. Motivations also correlate to participation in specific online platforms. Furthermore, it is shown that highly extraverted customers create more UGC after a negative service experience when motivated by vengeance. Finally, higher levels of altruistic and self-enhancement motivations correlate with a positive attitude towards a firm’s response, whereas customers who are motivated by vengeance have a negative attitude towards a firm’s response.

Customers who share their negative service experience by creating UGC in social media can be segmented according to their motivation. Service providers should inspect the UGC of their customers to understand the motivation behind it. The motivation to create UGC varies across platforms, and hence, customized service recovery strategies are required.

This paper examines UGC creation in relation to motivation, extraversion, and attitude towards a firm’s response. This is the first reported application which collectively examines important issues like these in a unified theoretical framework.

Despite the importance of online word-of-mouth (WOM) communication to senders, receivers and concerned companies alike, a surprisingly limited amount of research exists on the impacts of online WOM participation on the senders themselves. Motivated by an attempt to fill this significant gap in the literature, this paper aims to investigate the sender outcomes of online WOM participation.

The authors draw on insights from focus group studies and psychological theories of emotions, catharsis and regret and the signaling theory to develop a conceptual model linking the drivers and content characteristics of online WOM participation and sender outcomes.

The findings show that sender outcomes from online WOM transmission differ by the types of drivers stimulating the online sharing activity and the level of exaggeration in the senders’ self-generated contents. Specifically, online WOM triggered by emotions leads to catharsis and emotional homeostasis among the senders, while that stimulated by motivational drivers such as altruism, reciprocity, self-enhancement and belongingness leads to sender happiness. Exaggeration in self-generated WOM contents by the senders, in turn, leads to delayed outcomes of sender regret and reduced sender trust in general online WOM contents.

The most important contribution to online WOM research lies in the study of the outcomes of WOM transmission from a sender’s point of view. By drawing on our exploratory findings and psychological theories of emotions, catharsis and regret and the signaling theory, the authors develop a conceptual model linking the drivers and the exaggeration nature of online WOM participation and sender outcomes.

Managers should realize that the most fundamental way of ensuring positive consumption experiences is to listen to customer voices, including even the most negative of feedback shared privately or publicly, and use that information to improve essential customer experience aspects. The finding on the effects of online WOM exaggerations on sender regret suggests that companies and consumers alike should work on ensuring producing more accurate and complete online customer reviews. The finding on the negative effect of online WOM exaggerations on sender trust raises an important question on the meaning of high quality reviews from the company’s perspective. To pursue high quality reviews, merchants should not only aim at receiving the highest possible numeric ratings but also encourage most truthful accounts of purchase and usage experiences. In turn, online platforms such as Amazon should also factor the quality of online ratings more effectively into their product recommendation algorithms.

In further consideration of consumer welfare implications, online WOM transmissions should be more recognized as a tool for allowing consumers to cleanse their emotions associated with marketing stimuli.

Overall, the qualitative study and proposed conceptual model contribute to a more thorough and deeper understanding of individual-level sender outcomes of online WOM participation.

This study is a preliminary effort to examine “muted anger” in the workplace. Muted anger is a unique interpersonal and organizational phenomenon, incorporated in the Dual Threshold Model (DTM) of workplace anger (Geddes & Callister, 2007). Characterized as a form of suppressed workplace anger, muted anger occurs when angry organizational members intentionally keep their anger hidden from management and those responsible for the problematic situation, and instead express their emotions to colleagues (and others) unrelated to the initial anger-provoking incident. Using the DTM framework, we surveyed 296 full-time employees regarding their experience with an angry colleague who vented to them after an infuriating event. Our findings indicate that whether or not muted anger episodes can lead to productive communication practices depends on the anger intensity of both the actor and the sympathetic responder as well as the responder's level of organizational commitment. Those who themselves felt moderate anger intensity after hearing their colleague's plight and those with high organizational commitment were more likely to advocate on behalf of their angry colleague and approach management or someone in a responsible position to help address the problematic situation. Those with lower anger intensity and organizational commitment typically discussed the situation with one or two additional, but unrelated persons – expanding the muted anger episode.

The purpose of this study was to explore school principals' sources of felt anger and to trace their forms of anger regulation in the workplace.

Based on semi-structured interviews with 30 elementary and secondary school principals in Israel, a typology of anger regulation is presented and analyzed.

The typology includes three types of perceived anger regulation: anger and surface acting, a moderate expression of anger and an authentic expression of anger. While teachers and students may provoke the principal's anger, most commonly external constituencies (e.g. Ministry of Education, Local Education Authorities) trigger their intense anger. Concluding the paper are suggestions for further research on anger in educational leadership and practical recommendations.

study fills the gap in knowledge about emotion regulation in educational leadership, in general, and increases our insights into the values and norms that delineate the degree to which anger expression is appropriate in the school, in particular.

After a brief review of the origins of this work, a theory of the emotional/relational origins of male violence is outlined, and illustrated by episodes in Hitler’s life. Drawing on earlier work on aggression and violence, I propose that three conditions lead to rage and violence: (1) No affectional attachments. (2) A single overarching obsession. (3) Complete repression of shame. Key features of the theory are illustrated by details in Hitler biographies. This case suggests a way in which emotions unite leaders and led, leading to collective violence. Finally, a method that would provide a preliminary test of the theory is suggested.

Venting negative emotions on social networking sites (SNS) has become a growing phenomenon among dissatisfied customers. Drawing on social cognitive theory (SCT), the purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of personal outcome expectations and computer self-efficacy on the posting of negative behavior and its impact on venting negative emotions on SNS.

Structural equation modeling was conducted, and 342 dissatisfied customers in Taiwan made up the sample.

This study found that both personal outcome expectations and computer self-efficacy positively affect the posting of negative behavior, which increases the effect of venting negative emotions. Moreover, gender moderates the relationships between the variables in the proposed model.

A bias may exist because sampling was conducted through an online survey on a specific website. This study extended the SCT model by adding the effect of venting negative emotions to the original model and suggested that researchers take gender into consideration when developing consumer complaint theories.

This study suggested that service providers need to detect negative statements and take action before these statements lead to switching behavior among dissatisfied customers. Moreover, “webcare” is recommended as an effective tool to counter negative comment effects among those exposed to complaints on SNS.

This study advanced the understanding of SCT for dissatisfied customers posting negative experiences in the context of SNS.