Judging Up the Corporate Ladder: Understanding the Social Conduct of Workers

The purpose of this research was to examine the social conduct of workers toward managers following a negative work event involving their managers. Three studies were conducted to examine the relationships among attributions, judgments of responsibility, anger and sympathy, and antisocial and prosocial behaviors. In Study 1, we manipulated ability and effort attributions with scenarios in order to examine the cognitive, affective, and behavioral outcomes of hypothetical workplace events. In Studies 2 and 3, we replicated these results using a retrospective, critical-incidents methodology and further explored the mediational relationships between cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses. Findings from the 3 studies supported hypotheses derived from Weiner's (1995) theory of social conduct.