Although personal or professional slights are common, sometimes feeling wronged can lead people to retaliate in ways that are harmful to other employees or the organization.
In recent memory, we’ve seen seemingly well-intentioned CEOs engage in unethical behavior that eventually leads to organizational ruin. Why do they do it? Don’t these executives stand to lose the most from organizational failure? After all, their lives and reputations are most intertwined with the company. Fortunately, a groundbreaking theory is beginning to make sense of this baffling situation.
Unethical employees can be a major problem at work, but not good old co-worker Steve; He’s usually a pretty decent guy. However, today Steve is faced with a moral dilemma: Should he steal Amy’s tasty turkey sandwich that is sitting unattended in the fridge? New research shows that because Steve was just excluded from an interesting lunch-time discussion, it might make him more likely to commit the crime. But why?
We tend to think that fairness in the workplace is always good, but new research has found a situation in which fairness can actually cause trouble between employees. In fact, it may be leading envious employees to act out in counter-productive ways. How does this happen, and how can organizations best prepare themselves to deal with the problem?
We’ve all heard about the unparalleled ability to predict job success by using intelligence tests, but do they tell us everything we need to know? New research uses meta-analysis to explore whether intelligence can predict other kinds of work behavior that can make an organization sink or swim. They find that in some cases, personality testing actually comes out ahead.
So, how many cups of coffee have you had today? New research shows that ingesting caffeine actually makes it less likely that sleep deprived employees will behave unethically in the workplace. The study also uncovered the nefarious role played by co-workers acting unethically, and showed how they can make sleep deprived people do more bad things.
We tend to think of bullying as something that happens to kids at school, but a new review discusses the prevalence of workplace bullying, as well as its alarming harmful effects. Researchers are starting to consider bullying another form of organizational corruption.
Abusive supervision is a nasty common occurrence in the modern workplace. New research shows that supervisors are more likely to be abusive if they were exposed to family-related aggression as a child, especially if the supervisors are also “ruminators”. What can organizations do about it?
High Performers are defined as the group of talented employees that typically increase both team and organizational performance. Past research has shown that High Performers are likely to be victimized in the workplace by other organizational members. A new study attempts to explain the victimization of High Performers by examining the role of envy and work group identification.
The use of social media at work is becoming increasingly common. A recent study done to develop a questionnaire for measuring good and bad social media behaviors revealed that, in addition to harmful social media behaviors being related to decreased performance, the beneficial behaviors seemed to have no significant relationship to performance. In short, no particular increase in performance output was detected.
