We conducted a study of aviators who experienced a close brush with death at work, in an effort to better understand how such events influence thoughts about work. Importantly, our initial interviews suggested that participants used conversational storytelling about their close brush with death as a means of enhancing the meaningfulness of their work. That initial finding presented us with a puzzle, as the literatures connecting storytelling to the meaning of work view stories as useful for meaning as understanding-not meaning as fulfillment (i.e., meaningfulness). Additional interviews culminated in a theoretical model where the raw materials of the close brush with death (loss of life, errors by the crew) created stories with more versus less dramatic tension. Differences in dramatic tension then shaped how story work (humor, poetic license) was used to craft the tale, how the tellings were experienced (teller emotions, audience reactions), and how gains in meaning as fulfillment (significance, belonging, esteem) were realized. In the end, participants with more and less dramatic tension in their stories were both able to use tellings to cultivate meaning as fulfillment, albeit in distinct and varying ways. Our findings therefore illustrate that the literatures connecting storytelling to the meaning of work have given short shrift to the power of stories. We discuss the implications of our theorizing for the meaning of work and storytelling at work literatures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Third parties have increasingly become the focus of research on mistreatment in organizations. Much of that work is grounded in deonance theory, which argues that third parties should react to the perpetrators of mistreatment with anger. Deonance theory is less explicit as to how third parties should react to the victims of mistreatment, though empirical work has pointed to empathy as one potential reaction. Deonance theory is less capable of explaining recent findings suggesting that third parties may react to mistreatment events with schadenfreude. The purpose of our study was to conduct a meta-analytic test of an integrative model specifying the relationships between third-party perceptions of mistreatment and reactions to perpetrators and victims. That model predicted that third-party perceptions of mistreatment would be associated with emotional reactions (anger toward the perpetrator, empathy toward the victim, schadenfreude from the event), cognitive reactions (evaluations of the perpetrator and victim), and behavioral reactions (antisocial and prosocial behaviors toward the perpetrator and victim). Our model testing provides the first quantitative synthesis of the third-party mistreatment literature while surfacing counterintuitive findings that would not be anticipated from deonance theory's arguments. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our work while providing guidance for future research.

Discussions about the status of scholarly journals in management have tended to revolve around impact factor and standing on relevant lists-cues whose validity has been oft-debated. We introduce a new metric for gauging the status of scholarly journals. Syllabus share represents the proportion of doctoral seminar syllabi comprised of articles from a given journal. We introduce this metric by drawing on a content analysis of 179 management doctoral syllabi (90 micro seminars, 89 macro seminars) from 53 business schools in North America, Europe, and Asia. Our results showed that syllabus share was distinct from impact factor and standing on relevant ranking and advisory lists. Moreover, syllabus share was correlated with perceptions of journal status on the part of both junior and senior scholars. Syllabus share provides a more continuous view of journal status (in contrast to lists) while allowing results to be contextualized (in contrast to impact factor). Our discussion focuses on the value of syllabus share for a more pluralistic conceptualization of journal status and its contributions to the scholarship of management education.

Existing work on legacy in management has focused on the upper echelons and on the "legator"-the person leaving the legacy. Drawing on the meaning maintenance model and concepts surrounding psychological ownership and identity, we build a model that focuses on "legatees"-the beneficiaries of the legacy-in the lower echelons. The depar-ture of a manager, informal leader, or star serves as a disruption to legatees' mental rep-resentations of their working world. That disruption causes them to attend to issues of ownership (either psychological ownership or disownership of the legacy) and identity (either identification or rivalry with the legator) in order to fulfill salient needs. Fulfilling continuity and belonging needs results in two behaviors that enhance the durability of the legator's contributions: maintaining and evangelizing. Fulfilling distinctiveness and efficacy needs results in two behaviors that reduce the durability of the legator's contri-butions: neglecting and erasing. We theorize that these relationships are moderated by two aspects of the legacy: its magnitude and its content (in terms of whether the contribu-tions are tangible or intangible). We describe the implications of our model for the legacy literature in management and lay out an agenda for future research.

We provide a review of progress in the field of organizational justice, paying special attention to articles published in Personnel Psychology. We begin by describing the foundation of the literature, where work linked adherence to distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice rules to employee cognitions, emotions, behaviors, and well-being. We then turn to the extensions that marked the next stage of the literature's evolution, including justice climate, third-party perspectives, and justice enactment-where managerial motives, characteristics, and context are cast as predictors of justice rule adherence. Next, we move to suggestions for future research, including manager-based outcomes of justice rule adherence, more explicit integrations with the social justice literature, and gaining a better understanding of the fairness of artificial intelligence systems. We close with the practical implications of the justice literature, many of which have been informed by advancements in the pages of Personnel Psychology.

The literature on identity construction argues that employees work to create coherent and distinctive identities that encapsulate individual characteristics and professional and organizational memb...

This chapter describes the author’s journey as a justice scholar, beginning with his first exposure to the area as an undergraduate working on an honors thesis. The author details how he engaged with the literature during graduate school and how his major contributions to the literature came about. Those contributions included a new measure of justice, the first metaanalysis of the literature, and integrations of justice with three other areas: teams, personality, and trust. He also describes an intrinsic motivation-based model that explains much of his influence and longevity as a justice scholar. Rooted in Spreitzer’s 1995 work on psychological empowerment, the model recommends that scholars: choose topics because of intrinsic interest rather than practicality or inertia; play to conceptual and methodological strengths when shaping projects; do research that improves the workplace while collaborating with PhD students whenever possible; and strive to do bigger projects that are relevant to the entire expanse of a literature.

Emotional distress is a common occurrence in ordinary workplaces. Recent reports suggest that one in four members of the workforce are suffering from psychological distress, and that one in six are suffering from clinical levels of depression or anxiety. Much of the research on workplace distress focuses on the causes and consequences of distress, as well as the stable characteristics of individual employees that impact their ability to cope with distress in the workplace. However, less attention has been paid to both organizational and interpersonal factors that can help mitigate employee suffering, as well as the behaviors that employees engage in to make sense of, and move forward from, their distress. Additionally, while there is a body of research that investigates the experience of change and resilience in the aftermath of adversity in the workplace, these have all been conducted in the context of inherently traumatic occupations, such as the military or emergency services. Unfortunately, little research investigates this process in the context of “ordinary” work. In an effort to gain greater insight into these questions relating to distress at work, we invited scholars studying this phenomenon within organizations. Together, these scholars shed light on distress in the context of ordinary work, including how suffering emerges in organizational contexts, as well as the types of behaviors that employees engage in to recognize, make sense of, and communicate about their own and others’ distress in interpersonal or organizational settings. These processes are vital for both alleviating distress and creating healthy organizational cultures. Navigating Employee vs. Client Needs Within Trauma-Supportive Organizations Presenter: Solomiya Draga; U. of Toronto Presenter: Rachel Lise Ruttan; U. of Toronto A Relational Perspective on Sharing Suffering in Organizations Presenter: Ashley Elizabeth Hardin; Washington U. in St. Louis Presenter: Kristina Marie Workman; Cornell U. Presenter: Liza Yasemin Barnes; U. of Colorado, Boulder Presenter: Jane E. Dutton; U. of Michigan Self-Other Asymmetries in Expressions of Sympathy Presenter: Rachel Lise Ruttan; U. of Toronto Presenter: Sora Jun; U. of Texas at Dallas Presenter: Katherine Ann DeCelles; U. of Toronto Deriving Purpose from Storytelling After Close Brushes with Death Presenter: David Montgomery Long; College of William and Mary Presenter: Jason Colquitt; U. of Notre Dame Presenter: Rachel Burgess; U. of Georgia Presenter: Kevin W. Rockmann; George Mason U. Leading with Depression and Anxiety Presenter: Sally Maitlis; U. of Oxford

Although studies have linked procedural justice to a range of positive attitudes and behaviors, the focus on justice has neglected other aspects of decision-making procedures. We explore one of those neglected aspects: procedural timeliness-defined as the degree to which procedures are started and completed within an acceptable time frame. Do employees react to how long a procedure takes, not just how fair it seems to be? To explore that question, we examined the potential effects of procedural timeliness using six theories created to explain the benefits of procedural justice. This integrative theory-based approach allowed us to explore whether "how long" had unique effects apart from "how fair." The results of a three-wave, two-source field study showed that procedural timeliness had a significant indirect effect on citizenship behavior through many of the theory-based mechanisms, even when controlling for procedural justice. A laboratory study then replicated those effects while distinguishing procedures that were too fast versus too slow. We discuss the implications of our results for research on fostering citizenship behavior and improving supervisors' decision-making procedures.

Several reviews have been critical of the degree to which scales in industrial/organizational psychology and organizational behavior adequately reflect the content of their construct. One potential reason for that circumstance is a tendency for scholars to focus less on content validation than on other validation methods (e.g., establishing reliability, performing convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validation, and examining factor structure). We provide clear evaluation criteria for 2 commonly used content validation approaches: Anderson and Gerbing (1991) and Hinkin and Tracey (1999). To create those guidelines, we gathered all new scales introduced in Journal of Applied Psychology, Academy of Management Journal, Personnel Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes from 2010 to 2016. We then subjected those 112 scales to Anderson and Gerbing's (1991) and Hinkin and Tracey's (1999) approaches using 6,240 participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk with detailed, transparent, and replicable instructions. For both approaches, our results provide evaluation criteria for definitional correspondence-the degree to which a scale's items correspond to the construct's definition-and definitional distinctiveness-the degree to which a scale's items correspond more to the construct's definition than to the definitions of other orbiting constructs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Organizational justice is a topic that has been studied by numerous researchers, so much so that one might wonder whether there is anything left for future researchers to investigate. This is particularly an issue for newcomers to the literature, as they may feel overwhelmed by the amount of work already conducted. The purpose of this symposium is to alleviate this concern; indeed, each of the papers in this symposium reveals that there is still much to discover about organizational justice. The papers address novel discoveries about organizational justice such as the effect of gender, the affective state of the individual, justice enacted toward family members, and how the deliberate actions of employees can influence organizational justice. More specifically, Mu, Shen, and Bobocel study the effect of gender on the types of justice adherence expected, and the penalties supervisors receive as a result when they violate justice. Hill, Matta, and Mitchell examine the effect of the individual’s affective state on their justice perceptions and the behaviors that follow. Burgess, Colquitt, and Vogel expand the scope of organizational justice by incorporating how justice at home influences justice at work. Koopman, Lee, and Stoverink investigate how individuals can intentionally engage in certain behaviors to earn justice from their supervisors. The papers in this symposium demonstrate the ways in which researchers can contribute to expanding the organizational justice literature in meaningful ways. Subordinate Gendered Reactions to Supervisor Interpersonal Justice Violations Presenter: Frank Mu; U. of Waterloo Presenter: Winny Shen; U. of Waterloo Presenter: Ramona Bobocel; U. of Waterloo Woke Up on the Right Side of the Bed? Morning Mood on Daily Justice Rule Perceptions and Performance Presenter: Edwyna Theresa Hill; U. of Georgia Presenter: Fadel Khalil Matta; U. of Georgia Presenter: Marie S. Mitchell; U. of Georgia Does Fairness Beget Fairness? A Daily Investigation of Supervisor Fairness Toward Kids and Employees Presenter: Lauren Rachel Burgess; U. of Georgia Presenter: Jason Colquitt; U. of Georgia Presenter: Ryan M. Vogel; Fox School of Business, Temple U. Striving for Justice: A Politically Motivated Investigation of Supervisor Adherence to Justice Rules Presenter: Joel Koopman; Texas A&M U. Presenter: Young Eun Lee; Texas A&M U., College Station Presenter: Adam C. Stoverink; U. of Arkansas

We conducted two studies examining how the "look and feel" of an organization shapes newcomers' trust in that organization. More specifically, we examined the effects of situational normality-the degree to which the work setting appears customary, with everything in proper order. We then introduced the construct of situational aesthetics-the degree to which the work setting has a pleasing and attractive appearance. A field study of new accountants revealed that situational normality and situational aesthetics had indirect effects on trust through perceived trustworthiness, with trust going on to predict coworker ratings of learning behavior. We then replicated those trustworthiness findings in a laboratory setting. Taken together, our results suggest that newcomer trust formation may be shaped by aspects of the work setting that have been heretofore ignored by trust scholars.

Scholars have long acknowledged that perceptions of justice and fairness are "in the eye of the beholder." Unfortunately, few attempts have been made to identify the substantive constructs that reside within that subjectivity. As a result, it is difficult to know whether low employee-rated fairness reflects managers who are truly violating justice rules, or whether it instead points to employees who are unusually strict in their perceptions. Drawing on fairness heuristic theory and conceptualizations of personality, we introduce fairness propensity a tendency to view events, people, and organizations as fair. We theorize that fairness propensity is predicted in part by life narrative themes and trait dispositions that are communal in nature, given the relevance of fairness to relationships. We further theorize that fairness propensity shapes perceptions of overall fairness by influencing both "fairness anchors" the first impressions of how fair authorities are and perceptions of adherence to justice rules. A field study using employees from multiple organizations supported these predictions, even when controlling for other personality variables in the justice domain. We discuss the implications of fairness propensity for future research in the justice literature.

Several reviews have been critical of the content validity of scales used in applied psychology. Hinkin and Tracey’s (1999) technique–where naive raters gauge the degree to which scale items correspond to construct definitions–offers one quantitative approach to assessing content validity when new scales are introduced. Unfortunately, there is no clear standard–no proverbial “.70”–for judging whether definitional correspondence is adequate or inadequate. To create such a standard, we gathered all new scales introduced in Journal of Applied Psychology, Academy of Management Journal, Personnel Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes from 2010 to 2015. We then subjected those 91 scales to Hinkin and Tracey’s (1999) technique using 1866 undergraduates and MTurkers, with a common rating scale and expanded instructions. Our results showed that the scales averaged a 5.30 out of 7.00 for definitional correspondence. We propose dividing the former by the latter to create a coefficient in more typical units, yielding a .76 average. Additional analyses showed that scales validated using Hinkin and Tracey’s (1999) technique yielded better results, as did scales with more clearly written construct definitions.

Many employees feel a general sense of unfairness toward their supervisors. A common reaction to such unfairness is to talk about it with coworkers. The conventional wisdom is that this unfairness talk should be beneficial to the aggrieved employees. After all, talking provides employees with an opportunity to make sense of the experience and to "let off steam." We challenge this perspective, drawing on cognitive-motivationalrelational theory to develop arguments that unfairness talk leads to emotions that reduce the employee's ability to move on from the unfairness. We first tested these proposals in a three-wave, two-source field study of bus drivers (Study 1), then replicated our findings in a laboratory study (Study 2). In both studies, we found that unfairness talk was positively related to anger and negatively related to hope. Those emotions went on to have direct effects on forgiveness and indirect effects on citizenship behavior. Our results also show that the detrimental effects of unfairness talk were neutralized when the listener offered suggestions that reframed the unfair situation. We discuss the implications of these results for managing unfairness in organizations.