Background: Conduct that degrades employees — belittling speech, the coercive use of rank, and treatment stratified by contractual or national category — ranks among the most consequential and least tractable problems confronting the human resource (HR) function, which authors the policies prohibiting such conduct, administers the channels through which it is reported, and answers for the outcome when a report yields nothing. This study asks how such conduct persists within an organization that formally forbids it, and where HR can intervene, by reconstructing the fairness appraisals and safety calculations that employees use to decide whether to speak. Evidence bearing on that question has accumulated overwhelmingly in Anglophone, individualist economies, leaving scholarship and practice alike thinly provisioned for hierarchical Gulf workplaces, where deference norms, kinship obligation, and stratified expatriate labor markets condition what employees regard as sayable. Purpose: This theory-driven exploratory study investigates three questions of a single large Saudi-headquartered multinational: how personnel interpret the unacceptable conduct they encounter or witness, why so few translate that interpretation into a formal complaint, and which organizational arrangements hold the resulting pattern in place. Theoretical Framework: Two established lenses are combined. Organizational Justice Theory (OJT; Colquitt, 2001; Greenberg, 1987) supplies the vocabulary through which employees appraise the fairness of outcomes, procedures, and interpersonal treatment. Psychological Safety Theory (PST; Edmondson, 1999; Kahn, 1990) provides the vocabulary for perceived risk associated with speaking. Read jointly, the two treat harmful conduct not as isolated incivility but as a fairness appraisal that simultaneously recalibrates the felt cost of voice. Methodology: Evidence was assembled within a single bounded case and drawn from two registers of employee talk. The first comprises 197 unsolicited postings left by staff on a company-wide internal communication platform. The second comprises thirty-nine semi-structured conversations held privately with employees across operational, professional, supervisory, and senior grades, and across permanent and agency contracts, spanning four nationality groupings. Both corpora were interpreted through reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2019), double-coded on a stratified subsample, and read against one another for convergence. Key Findings: The analysis produced five categories. Supervisory authority was misused, most consequentially when appraisal ratings were used as leverage over compliance. Concerns were then withheld as a reasoned response to observed retaliation rather than as passive acceptance. Beneath both lay structural arrangements — contractual standing and personal connection — that distributed dignity before any encounter took place. Declared commitments to respect diverged visibly from enacted practice, and that divergence was itself read as evidence of where institutional protection lay. Cultural, religious, and generational registers supplied the terms in which employees judged conduct and justified their responses. Contributions: The study formalizes the Justice–Safety Vicious Cycle Model, a six-stage account in which each fairness violation lowers the perceived safety of speaking, each withheld concern removes the information that would otherwise trigger correction, and the resulting procedural dormancy licenses the next violation. Empirically, it supplies rare interior evidence from a Saudi industrial workplace and isolates the weaponization of performance appraisal as a distinct instrument of control. Methodologically, it demonstrates what is gained by reading spontaneous internal discourse alongside elicited interview accounts. For HR, the findings relocate the problem from individual supervisory temperament to the systems the function itself designs and administers — appraisal calibration and appeal, the separation of evaluation from investigation, enforceable protection for those who report, parity of treatment across employment categories, and merit-based personnel decisions — and the model identifies where in the cycle each of these levers takes effect.
As a crucial mechanism for regulating human behavior, self-control is influenced by both internal individual factors and external environmental factors. Existing research has established that disordered environments can impair an individual’s self-control, but exploration of moderating factors remains insufficient. This paper proposes that the sense of power is a significant moderating factor in the relationship between disordered environments and self-control. Through experiments employing an intertemporal choice task, a breath-holding task, and a Stroop task, this study verified both the impairing effect of disordered environments on self-control and the moderating role of the sense of power. The results demonstrate that disordered environments harm the willingness to exert self-control, behavioral performance, and inhibitory control. The self-control of individuals with a high trait sense of power was not negatively affected by disordered environments. Furthermore, elevating the state sense of power can protect self-control from the detrimental effects of disordered environments. These findings provide a new perspective for understanding the boundary conditions of, and interventions for, the impairing effect of disordered environments on self-control.
Remote work is often presented as a means to balance out work and family domains, by giving the ability to integrate the two domains. Using border theory and social role theory as a framework, the present study aims to uncover the relationships of autonomy, job demands, work engagement, and the involvement with domestic tasks, with doing household labour during the workday (HLW), and how these relationships may differ depending on gender. The study was conducted among a sample of 1309 workers (65.77% women), who worked remotely at least once a week. Hypotheses were tested with a logistic regression and fractional polynomials. Results were in contradiction with the hypothesized relationships. Job demands and work engagement increased the probability of doing HLW. Autonomy decreased the probability of doing HLW. Involvement in domestic tasks was non-linearly associated with HLW. Specifically, workers who had to deal with domestic tasks mostly by themselves were more likely to resort to HLW, whereas others were less likely to do so. The relationships of autonomy, job demands, work engagement and IDT with HLW did not differ depending on gender.
Bullying represents a major issue in physical education (PE) contexts. The role of bystanders is crucial, with their empathy being an essential lever to react to such situations. However, this empathy does not always seem to be a sufficient condition for action. This study examines highly empathic students, who are more likely to engage in helping behaviors, in order to analyze the emotions related to the different dimensions of empathy as well as the factors that facilitate or hinder bystander helping behaviors toward victims in the context of PE. The study is based on a qualitative approach involving interviews with 20 students aged 12 to 14. Each interview consists of recalling a critical incident of bullying observed during PE classes, as well as two open-ended questions on factors influencing bystander intervention in this context. The findings indicate that emotions related to affective empathy can influence the type of response adopted. They also reveal that the emotional vocabulary used to describe victims' emotions is still developing, and that early adolescence represents a particularly favorable period for its enrichment. Moreover, although students may display high levels of empathy, certain characteristics of PE classes could nevertheless generate fear, thereby hindering empathic processes and limiting their translation into helping behaviors. This research provides a better understanding of the relationships between empathy, the characteristics of PE classes, and reactions to bullying in this context, while offering directions for future research and a foundation for researchers to design interventions that can be implemented in PE classes.
This study examined the construct validity of performance-based emotion recognition tests. We recruited 227 adults (30-60 years old) through Prolific to complete four emotion recognition tasks in addition to measures of self-reported empathy, crystallised intelligence, social confidence, loneliness/well-being, interest in people versus things, and reading enjoyment (all measured with at least two indicators). Consistent with previous research, performance-based emotion recognition tasks were positively correlated and formed a separate cluster. This cluster correlated with crystallised intelligence but not with self-reported emotion recognition skills, social-emotional functioning, interest in people vs. things, or reading pleasure. Overall, our findings suggest that performance-based emotion recognition tests primarily assess skills related to those measured by performance-based tests of cognitive intelligence, rather than skills related to the social-emotional functioning as experienced by the participants. This may partially explain the low correlation between subjective and performance-based measures of emotion recognition.
