REVENGE AT WORKPLACE

What is revenge?
• The action of hurting or harming someone in return for an injury or
wrong suffered at their hands (Oxford dictionary).
• A kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more
ought law to weed it out (Bacon, 1625).
• Intention to see the perpetrator suffer (McCullogh et al., 2013).
• An effort in response to some perceived harm or wrongdoing by
another party which is intended to inflict damage, injury, discomfort
or punishment on the party judged responsible (Bies and Tripp,
2001).
• Payback, retaliation and establishing justice (Yoshimura, 2007).
What is revenge?
• It resembles to organizational incivility, aggression, mobbing, retaliation or
deviant behavior but yet it is not the same thing.
• What differentiates these concepts is the underlying intention and
triggering factors.
• Incivility gets motivated by competition, sadistic drive or thoughtlessness
these are not revenge motives.
• Mobbing and aggression is one-way behavior but revenge is responding
aggression with more aggression.
• Deviance is about not obeying the rules and norms of organization.
• Retaliation targets to give an organizational impact but revenge is
individualistic.
Revenge in organizational literature
• There are two dominant views on revenge:
• Managerial perspective: sees revenge as an unethical and dysfunctional
behavior, aims to eliminate potential employees who have tendency to
revenge at the recruitment process (Tripp and Bies, 2009; Sommers et al.,
2002).
• Employee-based perspective: tries to understand the underlying causes of
revengeful behavior by focusing on situational and environmental issues
which triggers anger and revenge, aims to reduce the injustice or inequity at
workplace (Bies and Tripp, 2005).
Model of revenge
• It depends on individual’s position at workplace
• Managers and employees have different reasons to show revengeful
behavior
Workplace offense
• Three main categories:
• Goal obstruction: occurs when a coworkers actions thwart an employee from
reaching a goal.
• coworker who wins a promotion, thus thwarting another employees achievement of that
same promotion
• Leads to frustration (Buss, 1962)
• The experience of frustration can lead people to take revenge (Morrill, 1992; Neuman and
Baron, 1997).
• Rule violation: employees are motivated to seek revenge when the formal
rules of the organization are violated, thus damaging the sense of civic order
(Bies and Tripp, 1996) or sense of fabric of society (Darley and Pittman, 2003).
• a formal breach of contract between an employee and employer, which can lead to litigation
• when bosses or coworkers make promises but then break them, the victims may be
motivated to avenge such wrongs (stealing ideas, taking undue credit etc.)
Workplace offense
• Status and Power Derogation: any action that damages ones
reputation may provoke revenge.
• bosses who are hypercritical, over-demanding, and overly harsh––even cruel––in their
dealings with subordinates over time, can provoke revenge thoughts
• Destructive criticism (Baron, 1988) public ridicule intended to embarrass a subordinate or
coworker (Morrill, 1992), and when the employee is accused wrongly by a boss or peer (Bies
and Tripp, 1996)
Blame
• When an injustice is perceived, people act like intuitive jurists seeking
to assess responsibility or blame (Bies, 1987).
• If the victims judge that the offender negligently caused the harm,
blame is present, but reduced. If the victim judges that the offender
caused the harm on purpose, and selected the victim for
opportunistic reasons, then blame is considerable (Darley and
Pittman, 2003).
• There is evidence of the influence of cognitive biases and
attributional errors shaping ones blame assignment in the context of
injustice (Bies et al., 1997).
Victim’s Power
• When the victims have more power than their offenders, they are
much more likely to get even than when the victims have less power
than their offenders (Kim et al., 1998).
• Victims who have higher relative hierarchical status are more likely to
seek revenge (Aquino et al., 2001, 2006).
Procedural Justice Climate
• Procedural justice climate of the organization influences the choice of
coping response (Aquino et al., 2006).
• When victims perceive an organization to have fair grievance
procedures, victims more likely pursue justice through official,
organizational channels; however, when victims perceive that
organizations have unfair grievance procedures, then victims will
consider pursuing justice on their own, much as vigilantes take the
law into their own hands.
Revengeful behavior
• Grievance
• Whistleblowing
• Filing a lawsuit
• Aggression
• Mobbing
• Stealing from organization
• Harming the utilities
• Harming the relationship
• Keeping one’s distance
• Passive-aggressive reactions
Coping responses/alternatives to revenge

• Forgiveness: the set of motivational changes whereby one becomes

decreasingly motivated to retaliate against the offending partner,
decreasingly motivated to maintain estrangement from the offender, and
increasingly motivated by conciliation and goodwill toward the offender
despite the offenders hurtful actions (McCullogh et al., 2001).
• Reconciliation: an effort by the victim to extend acts of goodwill towards
the offender in the hope of restoring the relationship (McCullough et al.,
1997, 1998).
• What leads to these alternatives?
• Apologies
• Punishment
• Revenge