Mistreatment from peers can reduce the effects of respectful treatment from bosses, and respectful peers can offset mistreatment from bosses

• Date: 01 October 2020
• Author: Joel Brockner,Corinne Bendersky
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2441
• Published date: 01 October 2020

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Mistreatment from peers can reduce the effects of respectful

treatment from bosses, and respectful peers can offset

mistreatment from bosses

Corinne Bendersky

1

| Joel Brockner

2

1

Management and Organizations, UCLA

Anderson School of Management, Los

Angeles, California, USA

2

Management Division, Columbia Business

School, New York, New York, USA

Correspondence

Corinne Bendersky, Management and

Organizations, UCLA Anderson School of

Management, 110 Westwood Plaza, A418, Los

Angeles, CA 90095-1481, USA.

Email: corinne.bendersky@anderson.ucla.edu

Summary

The present studies examine the joint influence of interpersonal fairness from peers

and authorities on participants' organizational behaviors (citizenship) and attitudes

(commitment). In three experimental studies, we find that mistreatment from peers,

in the form of interpersonal unfairness, reduces the benefits that authorities gain

from treating the same employee with high interpersonal fairness themselves. We

also find that the negative effect of mistreatment from authorities can be offset by

high interpersonal fairness from peers. These results come about because the inter-

personal fairness shown not only by authorities but also by peers influences people's

sense of standing as organization members. We discuss theoretical and practical

implications, as well as limitations and suggestions, for future research.

KEYWORDS

coworker mistreatment, interpersonal fairness, sense of standing

1|INTRODUCTION

Interpersonal fairness reflects “the degree to which people are treated

with politeness, dignity, and respect by authorities or third parties

involved in executing procedures or determining outcomes”(Colquitt,

Conlon, Wesson, Porter, & Ng, 2001, p. 427). It has been shown to be

positively related to an array of organizationally directed attitudes

(e.g., organizational commitment) and behaviors (e.g., organizational

citizenship behaviors, also known as OCB; Cohen-Charash &

Spector, 2001; Colquitt et al., 2013). One of the main explanations of

these findings is that employees make inferences about how well they

are regarded as organizational members (i.e., their standing or social

status) based on how much they are treated with dignity and respect

by organizational representatives (Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler &

Blader, 2003; Tyler & Lind, 1992). Being treated more respectfully

indicates to people that they are held in higher standing (Tyler &

Lind, 1992), which has a positive influence on their organizationally

directed attitudes and behaviors (Tyler & Blader, 2003).

Although the vast majority of interpersonal fairness research has

focused on supervisors' treatment of subordinates, interpersonal fair-

ness and the resulting inferences employees make about their stand-

ing as organization members can come from multiple sources in the

workplace (Lavelle, Rupp, Manegold, & Thornton, 2015; Rupp, Sha-

piro, Folger, Skarlicki, & Shao, 2017). For example, when authorities

make decisions that affect an employee, peers may treat the affected

employee in ways that are more versus less polite, dignifying, and

respectful as well (Donovan, Drasgow, & Munson, 1998).

1

Although

there is considerable research on the independent effects of peer and

authority interpersonal behaviors (Chiaburu & Harrison, 2008), none

has examined how employees aggregate their experiences of interper-

sonal fairness treatment from authorities and peers to determine their

sense of standing in an organization. Nor has past research considered

how employees' resultant sense of standing may affect downstream

organizationally directed attitudes and behaviors in addition to target-

Joel Brockner contributed equally to this study.

1

Our construct of peer interpersonal fairness is different from the term “peer justice,”which

has been used to refer to generalized fairness treatment by coworkers (Li, Cropanzano, &

Bagger, 2013). Unlike us, those scholars are referring to a climate variable, rather than to

interpersonal treatment by specific peers.

Received: 4 June 2018 Revised: 23 March 2020 Accepted: 24 March 2020

DOI: 10.1002/job.2441

722 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2020;41:722–736.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job