Third-party perceptions of mistreatment: A meta-analysis and integrative model of reactions to perpetrators and victims.

Third parties have increasingly become the focus of research on mistreatment in organizations. Much of that work is grounded in deonance theory, which argues that third parties should react to the perpetrators of mistreatment with anger. Deonance theory is less explicit as to how third parties should react to the victims of mistreatment, though empirical work has pointed to empathy as one potential reaction. Deonance theory is less capable of explaining recent findings suggesting that third parties may react to mistreatment events with schadenfreude. The purpose of our study was to conduct a meta-analytic test of an integrative model specifying the relationships between third-party perceptions of mistreatment and reactions to perpetrators and victims. That model predicted that third-party perceptions of mistreatment would be associated with emotional reactions (anger toward the perpetrator, empathy toward the victim, schadenfreude from the event), cognitive reactions (evaluations of the perpetrator and victim), and behavioral reactions (antisocial and prosocial behaviors toward the perpetrator and victim). Our model testing provides the first quantitative synthesis of the third-party mistreatment literature while surfacing counterintuitive findings that would not be anticipated from deonance theory's arguments. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our work while providing guidance for future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Content validation guidelines: Evaluation criteria for definitional correspondence and definitional distinctiveness.

Several reviews have been critical of the degree to which scales in industrial/organizational psychology and organizational behavior adequately reflect the content of their construct. One potential reason for that circumstance is a tendency for scholars to focus less on content validation than on other validation methods (e.g., establishing reliability, performing convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validation, and examining factor structure). We provide clear evaluation criteria for 2 commonly used content validation approaches: Anderson and Gerbing (1991) and Hinkin and Tracey (1999). To create those guidelines, we gathered all new scales introduced in Journal of Applied Psychology, Academy of Management Journal, Personnel Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes from 2010 to 2016. We then subjected those 112 scales to Anderson and Gerbing's (1991) and Hinkin and Tracey's (1999) approaches using 6,240 participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk with detailed, transparent, and replicable instructions. For both approaches, our results provide evaluation criteria for definitional correspondence-the degree to which a scale's items correspond to the construct's definition-and definitional distinctiveness-the degree to which a scale's items correspond more to the construct's definition than to the definitions of other orbiting constructs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).