2017/06/06 by Michael D. Baer, Jessica B. Rodell, Rashpal K. Dhensa‐Kahlon +5 · 74 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Anger #Conflict Management and Negotiation #Economics #Forgiveness #Forgiveness and Related Behaviors #Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior #Management #Perspective (graphical) #Psychology #Social psychology #Supervisor
paper · doi:10.5465/amj.2016.0630
published in Academy of Management Journal 61(5), 1764-1788 (Academy of Management)
openalex publication_date 2017/06/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/26
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-motivational-relational 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.