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This is the 13th volume of a series of books on research in occupational health and well-being. The first six volumes were edited by Daniel C. Ganster and Pamela L. Perrewé, whereas volumes seven to thirteen were edited by Pamela L. Perrewé, Jonathon R. B. Halbesleben, and Christopher C. Rosen.
The fact that the series includes so many volumes on the topic of occupational health and well-being in itself lends testimony to current interest in this area of workplace health and safety. We have indeed witnessed a proliferation of stress research, especially with regard to mistreatment in organizations.
Volume 13 is very much the product of a competent team of authors based for the most part in the United States (22) or Canada (3). Thirteen of the members of the editorial advisory board are based in the United States, one in Switzerland, another in Germany, and another in Canada (Saint-Mary’s University is mistakenly identified as based in the United States). Although this configuration may reflect actual country-based interest in the topic of mistreatment, it does seem strange considering that a good deal of interesting research on occupational stress now emanates from Europe.
The volume contains eight chapters dealing with mistreatment. Some of these deal with mistreatment per se and others with specific forms of mistreatment such as aggression, incivility, ostracism, and abuse. The table of contents lists the eight chapters sequentially, but the overview presented by the editors in the preliminary pages makes it clear that the chapters can be sorted into three sections. The first section includes two chapters examining customer mistreatment. The second section includes four chapters that explore a variety of forms of organizational mistreatment. The third and final section of this volume includes two chapters on contextual, conceptual, and measurement issues surrounding organizational mistreatment research.
A first challenge with the structure of this book is that it is not reflected in the table of contents. A second challenge is that it does not make clear the difference between customer mistreatment, organizational mistreatment, mistreatment in organizations, and mistreatment by organizations. At first glance, “mistreatment in organizations,” the title of the volume, might be interpreted as mistreatment within the organization or relating to the mistreatment of employees. The fact that the first two chapters deal with the mistreatment of external stakeholders (i.e. customers) rather suggests “mistreatment by organizations.” How is organizational mistreatment different from mistreatment in organizations? Can the organization be considered an entity that engages in the mistreatment of individuals, groups, or other entities?
Unfortunately, the overview of the volume does not connect the dots in a way that would provide the reader with at least a general idea of the rationale supporting the structure of the volume. It might have been helpful as well to provide some basic definitions or a general conceptual model that integrates the variety of concepts used across sections and chapters.
Beyond the general structure and flow of the book, the fundamental question for the reader of a volume like this one is whether it provides clear answers and specific guidance relating to the topic of mistreatment in organizations. Being myself involved in research in this area, my understanding is that scholars will most likely consult only those chapters most closely associated with their work and current thinking. With this in mind, I will focus my brief review of each chapter with a focus on the main concepts and theories being leveraged. The idea here is not to provide a detailed review of each chapter but rather some anchors that will help scholars and thinkers decide whether or not to access and read the chapter.
Chapter 1 (Maureen L. Ambrose, Regina Taylor, and Ronald L. Hess Jr), titled “Can I help you? Employee prosocial rule breaking as a response to organizational mistreatment of customers,” addresses observer responses to mistreatment or how employees respond to the unfair treatment of customers (prosocial rule breaking). The deontic model of justice is applied to cast employees in the role of observers of injustice. Justice sensitivity, moral identity, and empathy are theorized to moderate the relationship between perceived unfairness and customer-directed prosocial rule breaking.
Chapter 2 (Jaclyn Koopman, Mo Wang, Yihao Liu, and Yifan Song), titled “Customer mistreatment: A review of conceptualizations and a multilevel theoretical model,” synthesizes conceptualizations of customer mistreatment. The theoretical perspectives include organization justice, affective events, signal of goal failure, and conservation of resources. The multilevel model of customer mistreatment developed in this chapter distinguishes individual-level customer mistreatment from encounter-level customer mistreatment.
Chapter 3 (Aurora J. Dixon, Chu-Hsiang Daisy Chang, and Russell E. Johnson), titled “Aggression with a conscience: A rational and moral framework for proactive workplace aggression,” addresses the motivation underlying perpetrators of workplace aggression. This chapter reviews the literature on perpetrator motives to then focus on the rational choice model of aggression. Predatory aggression refers to acts that are initiated to meet one of three motives: a- justice; b- compliance; and c- social identity. The chapter also presents the moral motives framework as well as propositions relating to proactive moral motives.
Chapter 4 (Michael P. Leiter, Emilie Peck, and Stephanie Gumuchian), titled “Workplace incivility and its implications,” first states that mistreating others at work can occur in a variety of ways such as bullying, emotional abuse, abusive supervision, counter-productive work behaviours, and social undermining. This chapter explores the antecedents and consequences of incivility, a less intense and more ambiguous form of workplace mistreatment. The predictors of incivility are examined through the lenses of the stressor-emotion model, self-control, and attachment styles. Occupational, employee, relationship, and health outcomes of incivility are reported. The chapter then reviews incivility intervention programs.
Chapter 5 (Kristin L. Scott and Michelle K. Duffy), titled “Antecedents of workplace ostracism: New directions in research and intervention,” explores the questions of why people ostracize others and what might individuals or organizations do to deter this type of behaviour and mitigate the undesirable outcomes linked to ostracism. These questions are addressed under the lens of evolutionary psychology theory. Within this broad framework, social norms are viewed as adaptive and functional with regard to the social system. They nonetheless may have dysfunctional consequences that mindfulness interventions in the workplace may alleviate.
Chapter 6 (Matthew R. Leon and Jonathon R. B. Halbesleben), titled “Coworker responses to observed mistreatment: Understanding Schadenfreude in the response to supervisor abuse,” integrates attribution theory to extend the workplace mistreatment literature by developing a model for the manifestation of Schadenfreude following observation of supervisor mistreatment. The emotion of Schadenfreude is malicious pleasure at another’s misfortune. This chapter analyzes abusive supervision and the attribution process as well as the antecedents of Schadenfreude.
Chapter 7 (Shani Pindek and Paul E. Spector), titled “Contextual factors in employee mistreatment,” considers the role of context from the perspective of both actor and target simultaneously. Drawing from a stressor-strain theoretical framework, the focus of this chapter is on the relationship between the work environment and mistreatment. The type of organization and occupation, norms, general climates, mistreatment specific climates, leadership, workplace characteristics, workplace stressors are all reviewed as contextual factors leading to employee mistreatment. The review highlights the usefulness of multi-level research designs in separating the objective portion from the individually perceived portion of such contextual factors.
Chapter 8 (Nathan A. Bowling, Kelly A. Camus, and Caitlin E. Blackmore), titled “Conceptualizing and measuring workplace abuse: Implications for the study of abuse’s predictors and consequences,” reviews the predictors and consequences of workplace abuse. The authors’ first point out that most studies have addressed more specific constructs such as abusive supervision, bullying, incivility, interpersonal conflict, interpersonal deviance, mobbing, petty tyranny, or violence. Having defined workplace abuse as a broader construct, the chapter reviews the item content of different measures used either from the perspective of the victim or the perpetrator.
This overview of “Mistreatment in Organizations” points to the numerous concepts, theories and perspectives currently leveraged in research on this topic. Although the last chapter provides some guidance for conceptual clarity, the diversity of theories and perspectives remains a challenge in this area of research. To borrow from occupational stress and well-being research, I would however qualify this not as a hindrance, but as a challenge demand.