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The use of reinforcement and punishment have been studied extensively in laboratory and organizational settings. It has been found that positive reinforcement is the most effective way to achieve the required behavior. Many theories and models have been developed in order to explain the relationship between punishment and fear and it has been found that these are correlated. The use of punishment and fear in the organizational setting has proved to be ineffective and undesirable. Managers must try to create an environment and climate where employees can express their full potential and respond to difficult challenges by letting go of fear of failure, fear of change, or fear of risk taking. Human resource management offers some alternatives and programs to assist in executing this task.

Employees’ information security policy (ISP) compliance exerts a significant strain on information security management. Drawing upon the compliance theory and control theory, this study attempts to examine the moderating roles of organizational commitment and gender in the relationships between reward/punishment expectancy and employees' ISP compliance.

Using survey data collected from 310 employees in Chinese organizations that have formally adopted information security policies, the authors applied the partial least square method to test hypotheses.

Punishment expectancy positively affects ISP compliance, but reward expectancy has no significant impact on ISP compliance. Compared with committed employees, both reward expectancy and punishment expectancy have stronger impacts on low-commitment employees' ISP compliance. As for gender differences, punishment expectancy exerts a stronger effect on females' ISP compliance than it does on males.

By investigating the moderating roles of organizational commitment and gender, this paper offers a deeper understanding of reward and punishment in the context of ISP compliance. The findings reveal that efforts in building organizational commitment will reduce the reliance on reward and punishment, and further controls rather than the carrot and stick should be applied to ensure male employees' ISP compliance.

Violence is a common problem in secure residential units for young people. Group workers often think that young people have to learn to behave by means of punishment. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether this approach is effective in these settings, and, if so, under what circumstances. Furthermore, it aims to provide alternatives to punishment when dealing with violence.

Recent evidence on the effectiveness of punishment in secure residential units is reviewed. In addition, methods which are promising in dealing with violence are described.

The review shows that punishment is often used to regain control by group workers or, alternatively, is a result of professional helplessness in the face of escalating problems. Only when the living group climate is marked by trust and cooperation can punishment be effective.

Punishment in secure residential settings can have severe negative consequences. Nevertheless, group workers are tempted to use it as a response to violence in an attempt to gain control.

Social systems devise rules for member conduct and often specify punitive action for nonconformity. However, confronting and signaling the intent to punish a rule violator may be an inherently face‐threatening and volatile situation. As such, in this paper we seek to add to the research aimed at minimizing the negative effects of confrontation. We conducted an experiment to examine the impact of linguistic cues and coercive potential on message categorization and on receiver perceptions of threat and face‐sensitivity. Results suggest that threats might be considered a special class of warnings, distinguishable by a speaker‐based locus of punishment Locus of punishment did not, however, impact perceptions of having been warned. These findings thus call into question the assumed parallelism between researcher conceptualizations of threats and warnings and those of typical language‐users. Additionally, targets reported feeling less threatened and perceived more face‐sensitivity, in cases when the speaker was not the source of punishment. Perceptions of threat were decreased when disclaimers were employed and where the message originated from a peer rather than an authority. Power of speech had an impact in ambiguous situations. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the mediating role of “moral clarity” and the moderating role of “hypocrisy” in the relationship between sense of power and punishment severity.

The data were collected using purposive sampling from 250 government officials serving at a responsible and authoritative position in different public sector organizations operating in Pakistan.

The study has found a significant indirect effect of sense of power on punishment severity through moral clarity. This study has also found that this indirect effect is significant at higher levels of hypocrisy but insignificant at lower or moderate level of hypocrisy.

The study offers serious practical implications by highlighting the role of hypocrisy in powerful individuals’ moral judgements and their decisions to exercise power and administer punishments.

The study is the first to develop and test a mediated-moderation model of the relationship between sense of power, moral clarity, hypocrisy and punishment severity.

The authors offer a unique theoretical model of social reactions to crime, criminals and other deviant behaviours. They suggest a “demand for punishment” approach and a macro level analysis of general incentives as these may be related to the phenomenon of crime. European and United Nations data are used to make international comparisons.

This paper aims to describe and analyse Swiss prisoners’ and experts’ views on collective punishment, the practice where a group is punished for one person’s transgression.

A series of qualitative interviews with prisoners and stakeholders are reported following thematic analysis.

Despite being forbidden by the Geneva Convention and other international instruments, participants from this study expressed the view that collective punishment continues to be practiced in some form in prisons in Switzerland, violating the rights of prisoners via unjust and arbitrary decision-making, unjust rules, inequalities in prison structures and continuation of incarceration based on the behaviour of others. Families can also be both victims and vectors of collective punishment, and prolonging the detention of prisoners who would otherwise have been released because of rare high-profile cases of reoffending can also be considered a form of collective punishment.

These significant findings suggest that collective punishment in various forms continues to be used in Swiss prisons.

Although supplier-initiated punishment is widely used to manage distributors’ opportunism, its spillover effect on unpunished distributors (i.e. observers) within the same distribution network remains under-researched. Specifically, this paper aims to investigate the curvilinear effect of punishment severity on an observer’s opportunism, and how such an effect is contingent on the observer’s network position.

This paper uses regression analysis with survey data gathered from 218 distributors in China’s automobile industry.

Punishment severity has an inverted U-shaped effect on the observers’ opportunism, and such effect is weakened by both the observers’ network centrality and their degree of dependence on the supplier.

The findings should encourage suppliers to focus more on the spillover effects of punishment on observers. To this end, the supplier must deliberately initiate the appropriate level of punishment severity against its distributors because an inappropriate level of punishment severity (e.g. too lenient) may unexpectedly raise the unpunished observers’ level of opportunism. Moreover, the supplier should be fully aware that observers’ specific network positions may produce varying spillover effects of the punishment.

This study enriches the literature on channel governance by revealing the curvilinear mechanism through which punishment severity influences observers’ opportunism. By applying social learning theory to channel punishment research, this study unveils both the inhibitive learning and the imitative learning forces inherent in a single punishment event, and it delineates their joint effect on an observer’s opportunism. In addition, this study outlines the observer’s vertical and horizontal relationships within the distribution network and explores their contingent roles in determining the spillover effects of punishment.

Recent studies indicate that exposure to physical punishment is associated with both aggressive behavior and peer victimization at school. The purpose of this paper is to explore the bidirectional relationship between aggressive behavior and peer victimization as outcomes of physical punishment, as well as the role of depressive symptoms.

A sample of 2,424 Finnish upper primary school pupils (1,282 girls, 1,148 boys, mean age=14.2, SD=1.0) completed an online survey during class. Two conditional process models were applied using a macro for SPSS developed by Hayes (2012).

Exposure to physical punishment was found to be associated with both aggressive behavior and peer victimization at school. The effect on victimization was partially mediated by aggressive behavior and depressive symptoms, whereas the effect on aggressive behavior was partially mediated by peer victimization experiences but not by depressive symptoms. The relationship between physical punishment and peer victimization was somewhat stronger for girls than for boys, but this effect was not accounted for by gender differences in depressive symptoms or aggressive behavior.

Few studies to date have addressed the connection between aggressive behavior and peer victimization as outcomes of physical punishment. In addition, the study expands on the concept of “victim personality” by examining the mediating role of depressive symptoms. Methodologically, the study is an example of how the statistical software SPSS can be used for multiple mediation and conditional process analysis as an alternative to SEM analyses.

The paper may provide policy makers with another tool for analyzing the impact of disciplinary actions against public accounting firms. It analyzes the termination of US public accounting firm Arthur Andersen using arguments developed in the capital punishment debate and develops a paradigm for examining future actions against public accounting firms. The authors reviewed major arguments for and against capital punishment and assessed their usefulness as a tool in examining the Andersen case. A paradigm was then developed to assess the propriety of the action against Andersen and possible future cases. Most arguments regarding capital punishment were applicable to the Andersen case, allowing the authors to develop a template for assessing future disciplinary actions against public accounting firms. The “death penalty”, as applied to Arthur Andersen, was justified. While corporations are “legal persons”, they are obviously not human. This weakens (or renders moot) some of the most powerful arguments against capital punishment. Furthermore, this paradigm may be less useful in societies that prohibit capital punishment. Provides a unique way of examining the impact of disciplinary action against public accounting firms.