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Past research has primarily focused on the negative impact of workplace mistreatment or aggression on the individuals involved, workgroups, and organizations. Certain circumstances, however, create paradoxical effects in which mistreatment positively relates to desirable workplace outcomes and characteristics at the individual and/or organizational level. Reviewing the theoretical and empirical evidence of beneficial outcomes provides researchers and practitioners with a more comprehensive understanding of the progression of workplace mistreatment, allowing them to target specific mechanisms to mitigate detrimental effects and potentially discover important avenues that lead to desired outcomes. A qualitative review of 13 articles demonstrated that different forms of aggression such as bullying, abusive supervision, incivility, and ostracism have positive relationships with paradoxical outcomes and characteristics such as resilience, prosocial behaviors, socially desirable behaviors, job performance, job satisfaction, and creativity. The authors caution against leveraging mistreatment as a method for producing these desired outcomes; instead, the authors encourage researchers and practitioners to utilize the information to further their understanding of the nomological network of workplace mistreatment and its underlying mechanisms, such as cognitive reappraisal and social learning.

Drawing from self-regulation theories, this study aims to present a model linking customer mistreatment to hotel employees’ displaced workplace deviance via self-regulatory depletion, with disposition-based mindfulness as a first‐stage moderator.

The authors conducted a multisource, multiwave investigation with 245 focal–coworker dyads at 14 full-service hotels in southern China. Descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analysis and regression analysis were performed.

The results demonstrated the mediating role of self-regulatory depletion in provoking hotel employees’ displaced deviant reactions to customer mistreatment. Additionally, employees with high trait mindfulness are less vulnerable to self-regulatory depletion and, thus, less likely to exhibit displaced workplace deviance.

This study enables hospitality administrators to understand that organizations and their employees, whether directly mistreated by customers, are potential victims of such negative events. Hospitality organizations should enhance mindfulness-based interventions and provide more humane care for employees to maintain their self-regulatory abilities, thereby reducing displaced workplace deviance.

First, in contrast to studies focusing primarily on internal factors that trigger employees’ deviant responses, the research suggests that mistreatment by external customers is a potentially meaningful yet largely unexamined antecedent of workplace deviance. Second, this study moves beyond “self-gain” explanations, suggesting that employees display deviance not because of a malicious intent to harm the organization or its members but because they are incapable of controlling their undesirable behaviors. Third, the research highlights how mindfulness mitigates customer mistreatment and displaced workplace deviance relationships.

The modern workplace contains many physical and interpersonal hazards to employee physical and psychological health/well-being. This chapter integrates the literatures on occupational safety (i.e., accidents and injuries) and mistreatment (physical violence and psychological abuse). A model is provided linking environmental (climate and leadership), individual differences (demographics and personality), motivation, behavior, and outcomes. It notes that some of the same variables have been linked to both safety and mistreatment, such as safety climate, mistreatment climate, conscientiousness, and emotional stability.

Contextual factors play a vital role in employee mistreatment. This chapter deals with the definition and scope of contextual factors, including a distinction between the objective environment and its idiosyncratic perception by employees. Several mechanisms are offered to explain the effects of context on mistreatment, including the stressor–strain framework, interaction with personal characteristics, and also mistreatment acting as a stressor. The framework suggested in this chapter uses levels of analysis, and proposes that the objective environment (group level variables) is perceived at the individual level, which consequently leads to both perpetrated and received mistreatment. Those same objective environment variables also have a direct effect on mistreatment, as well as a moderating role in the relationship between individually perceived context and mistreatment. Furthermore, there is some evidence that mistreatment acts as a contextual variable in and of itself, with perpetrators, victims, and bystanders perceiving mistreatment in their workplace and reporting higher levels of stressors and strains. Finally, we outline the need for more longitudinal, multi-level studies to clearly discern the role of context in employee mistreatment.

This daily diary study aims to examine the influences of daily poor sleep quality on employees’ emotional exhaustion at work via negative affect at home. Additionally, this study examines the moderating effects of day-level customer mistreatment and person-level workplace mindfulness in hotel frontline employees’ daily spillover from the nonwork domain to the work domain.

An experience sampling method was applied, and the survey data were collected from 98 frontline service employees in the hotel industry in China. This study included a one-time initial survey and a ten-day daily diary study.

This study reveals that frontline service employees’ poor sleep quality of the previous night influences their emotional exhaustion after work through negative affect at home. On days when employees perceived a low level of customer mistreatment, the daily positive association between negative affect at home and emotional exhaustion after work would be attenuated. Moreover, employees with a higher level of workplace mindfulness are less likely to be influenced by the negative affect at home.

This study suggests that hospitality organizations should extend their focus on caring about employees’ nonwork life quality, such as improving daily sleep quality and providing workplace mindfulness trainings.

This study adds to the current literature on work and nonwork spillover by considering the spillover process from employees’ nonwork domains to work domains by taking a dynamic and multilevel perspective.

With a foundation in social exchange theory, this study examines the relationship between servant leadership and three types of workplace mistreatment – bullying, incivility and ostracism – while also considering a mediating role of trust in the leader and a moderating role of the ethical climate.

Three time-lagged sets of data (N = 431) were collected among employees working in various sectors.

Servant leadership relates significantly to trust in the leader, as well as to workplace bullying, incivility and ostracism. In turn, trust in the leader mediates the relationship between servant leadership and all three types of workplace mistreatment. The results also indicate the presence of moderated mediation, in that the indirect effect of servant leadership on workplace mistreatment is moderated by the ethical climate.

This study adds to extant research by examining the mediating mechanism of trust in leaders with servant leadership and workplace mistreatment, along with interactive effects of ethical climate.

Workplace mistreatment and aggression have become pressing issues in today’s multi-generational workplace. Yet, to date, the issue of investigating the impacts of passive and active types of mistreatment simultaneously on different generations has been widely neglected in the management literature. The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore the resultant effects of active (i.e. workplace tolerance to incivility) and passive (i.e. workplace ostracism) mistreatments on negative emotion and intention to sabotage, a generational perspective.

Data were garnered from bank employees in Nigeria (n=320) and analyzed with the aid of a structural equation modeling technique.

The data reveal that active and passive workplace mistreatments are relevant factors inflicting negative emotions and intention to sabotage, and negative emotions inflict the intention to sabotage. Furthermore, the impact of passive workplace mistreatment on negative emotion is higher among Generations X and Y cohorts, and its impact on the intention to sabotage is higher among Baby Boomers cohorts. The impact of active workplace mistreatment on negative emotion is higher among Generation Y and Baby Boomers cohorts, and its impact on the intention to sabotage is higher among Generations X and Y cohorts.

This paper advances our knowledge concerning the reactional response of employees to workplace mistreatment generation wise. Based on the study findings, theoretical and practical implications are identified and discussed.

Existing research tends to conceptualize age- and gender-based discrimination as distinct and unrelated social phenomena. A growing body of scholarship, however, highlights the importance of conceptualizing ageism as potentially gendered, and gender discrimination as inherently shaped by age. Using an intersectional theoretical perspective, this chapter examines how gender and age combine to shape women’s and men’s experiences of workplace mistreatment.

The data are obtained from the U.S. General Social Survey. The analysis begins with descriptive statistics, showing how rates of perceived age and gender mistreatment vary for men and women of different age groups. Multivariate logistic regressions follow.

Experiences of workplace mistreatment are significantly shaped by both gender and age. Among both men and women, workers in their 30s and 40s report relatively low levels of perceived age-based discrimination, compared to older or younger workers. It is precisely during this interval of relatively low rates of perceived age-based discrimination that women’s (but not men’s) perceptions of gender-based mistreatment rises dramatically. At all ages, women are significantly more likely to face either gender- or age-based discrimination than men, but the gap is especially large among workers in their 40s.

Women tend to perceive age- and gender-based mistreatment at different times of life, but a concurrent examination of gender- and age-based mistreatment reveals that women’s working lives are characterized by high rates of mistreatment throughout their careers, in a way that men’s are not. The results highlight the importance of conceptualizing gender and age as intersecting systems of inequality.

Workplace incivility has been identified as a specific form of social mistreatment causing distress despite its low intensity. Research on workplace incivility has touched on a variety of personal and contextual factors associated with incivility’s prevalence including research on both antecedents and outcomes. The research has been especially concerned with identifying a wide range of negative consequences of incivility, including various occupational, interpersonal, and health-related implications. Theoretical explorations have considered links of incivility to sexism and racism, and its reflection of attachment styles, as well as its inherent connection with the stressor-emotion model of counterproductive work behavior (Spector & Fox, 2005). The power of incivility to elicit distress has been attributed to its capacity to signal riskiness of social situations that thwart core social motives (i.e., self-control). Intervention research has been relatively rare, but progress is evident.

This chapter summarizes a meta-analysis of 72 studies (N= 20,701) that link customer mistreatment (abusive, nasty, and rude behavior of customers toward employees) to psychological, attitudinal, and behavioral strains. Results showed that customer mistreatment related significantly to a variety of psychological and attitudinal strains (emotional exhaustion, emotional strain, job (dis)satisfaction, turnover intentions, perceived organizational support, and supervisor support) and behavioral strains (reduced customer service performance and counterproductive work behavior (CWB) directed toward organizations and customers). These results were similar to those found with general mistreatment, suggesting that mistreatment by organizational outsiders might have similar effects to mistreatment from organizational insiders. These results suggest a clear association of mistreatment with strains, but recent work is discussed that questions the typical assumption that mistreatment leads to CWB rather than the reverse.