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. However, we propose that anxiety can be important for propelling the enactment of interpersonal justice. We test our predictions across three studies (with four samples of full-time managers and employees). Theoretical and practical contributions include enhancing our understanding of who is motivated to enact interpersonal justice, why they are motivated to do so, and how to enhance justice in the workplace. Our findings also challenge the assumption that negative emotions are necessarily dysfunctional for the enactment of interpersonal justice and instead highlight the facilitative role of anxiety in this context.

Finding meaning in unfair experiences: Using expressive writing to foster resilience and positive outcomes.

Decades of research have demonstrated that experiencing workplace unfairness can result in profound negative consequences for employees. Integrating conservation of resources theory with meaning-finding perspectives, we argue that engaging in meaning-finding in the aftermath of unfairness can foster state resilience and promote positive outcomes. To promote meaning-finding, we develop and test a new expressive writing intervention (i.e. a guided writing technique that facilitates the processing of negative experiences). Results indicate that the meaning-finding expressive writing intervention is associated with higher resilience than traditional expressive writing. Moreover, resilience mediates the relationship between meaning-finding (vs. traditional) expressive writing and willingness to reconcile, positive relationships with others, and life satisfaction. Theoretically, our findings highlight that engaging in meaning-finding can transform aversive experiences into opportunities to foster resilience and positive outcomes. Practically, meaning-finding expressive writing provides an effective, simple, and cost-effective tool that can be used by employees and counseling programs to promote recovery.