The “Evil Pleasure”: Abusive Supervision and Third-Party Observers’ Malicious Reactions Toward Victims

Abstract

We investigated how abusive supervision influences interactions between third-party observers and abused victims and hypothesized when and why third parties react maliciously toward victims of abusive supervision. Drawing on the theory of rivalry, we predicted that third-party observers would experience an “evil pleasure” (schadenfreude) when they perceive a high level of rivalry with the victims of abusive supervision and that the experienced schadenfreude then would motivate third parties to engage in interpersonal destructive behaviors (i.e., undermining, incivility, and interpersonal deviance) toward the victims. We further proposed that such malicious reactions would be attenuated if groups have a high level of cooperative goals. Results based on one experimental study and two time-lagged field studies lend support to our propositions.

Customer-Oriented Constructive Deviance as a Reaction to Organizational Injustice Toward Customers

“…Despite these empirical advances, contemporary research has extensively focused on third-party reactions to injustice. It considers employees' perception of the fairness with which others have been treated (Priesemuth & Schminke, 2019;Urbanska et al, 2019;Xu et al, 2020). According to the deontic model of justice (Cropanzano et al, 2003(Cropanzano et al, , 2005Folger, 2001), when individuals observe unfair treatment in others, they experience a sense of moral unease, which, in turn, motivates them to react against the perpetrator and address the injustice (Ambrose et al, 2015).…”

The Consequences of Incongruent Abusive Supervision: Anticipation of Social Exclusion, Shame, and Turnover Intentions

“…Specifically, experiencing more abusive supervision relative to one's coworkers is associated with perceptions that one's coworkers do not respect them (Schaubroeck et al, 2016). This status differential can negatively affect individuals' relationships with coworkers because coworkers may socially exclude them, believe that the abuse the individual receives is warranted, or gain a sense of pleasure from the individual's situation (Leon & Halbesleben, 2015;Mitchell et al, 2015;Xu et al, 2020). Relatedly, research finds that coworkers are less likely to help employees who are victims of high levels of abusive supervision (Peng et al, 2014) and coworkers can even be motivated to actively undermine these victims (Xu et al, 2020).…”

“…This status differential can negatively affect individuals' relationships with coworkers because coworkers may socially exclude them, believe that the abuse the individual receives is warranted, or gain a sense of pleasure from the individual's situation (Leon & Halbesleben, 2015;Mitchell et al, 2015;Xu et al, 2020). Relatedly, research finds that coworkers are less likely to help employees who are victims of high levels of abusive supervision (Peng et al, 2014) and coworkers can even be motivated to actively undermine these victims (Xu et al, 2020). Experiences such as these, which communicate rejection, can instill in individuals an anticipation of future social rejection (Downey & Feldman, 1996;Feldman Barrett & Swim, 1998).…”

Auxiliaries to Abusive Supervisors: The Spillover Effects of Peer Mistreatment on Employee Performance

“…The comparison process in turn impacts the third-party employees' outcomes (e.g., Jiang et al 2019). Third-party employees' reactions to witnessing the abusive supervision of the target employee include feelings of sympathy (Mitchell et al 2015), schadenfreude (Qiao et al 2019;Xu et al 2020), unfairness (Blader et al 2013), and so on. Both types of research interests take a reactive position to show how either the victim or the thirdparty employees respond to the directly experienced or the witnessed abusive supervision.…”