Delivering bad news fairly: The influence of core self-evaluations and anxiety for the enactment of interpersonal justice.

What motivates managers to deliver bad news in a just manner and why do some managers fail to treat recipients of bad news with dignity and respect? Given the importance of delivering bad news in a just manner, answering these questions is critical to promote justice in the workplace. Drawing on appraisal theories of emotions, we propose that people with higher core self-evaluations may be less likely to deliver bad news in an interpersonally just manner. This is because these actors are more likely to appraise the delivery of bad news as a situation in which they have high coping potential and are therefore less likely to experience anxiety.

Moving beyond assumptions of deviance: The reconceptualization and measurement of workplace gossip.

Despite decades of research from other academic fields arguing that gossip is an important and potentially functional behavior, organizational research has largely assumed that gossip is malicious talk. This has resulted in the proliferation of gossip items in deviance scales, effectively subsuming workplace gossip research into deviance research. In this paper, the authors argue that organizational research has traditionally considered only a very narrow subset of workplace gossip, focusing almost exclusively on extreme negative cases which are not reflective of typical workplace gossip behavior.