Delivering Bad News: How Procedural Unfairness Affects Messengers’ Distancing and Refusals

Abstract

Drawing from a social predicament and identity management framework, we argue that procedural unfairness on the part of decision makers places messengers in a dilemma where they attempt to protect their professional image or legitimacy by engaging in refusals (e.g., curbing explanations) and exhibiting distancing behaviors (e.g., minimizing contact with victims) when delivering bad news. Such behaviors however, violate key tenets of fair interpersonal treatment. The results of two experiments supported our hypotheses in samples of experienced managers. Specifically, we found that levels of messengers' distancing and refusals were greater when the procedures used by decision makers were unfair rather than fair. Additionally, messengers' perceptions of a predicament (honesty versus disclosure) mediated these relationships. Implications and future research directions regarding the ethical delivery of bad news in the workplace are discussed.

Organizational Justice, Project Performance, and the Mediating Effects of Key Success Factors

“…Akintoye, McIntosh, and Fitzgerald (2000), Akintoye and Main (2007) and Jha and Iyer (2007) emphasise in their research that commitment is a key factor for the successful project delivery and some studies related to organisational justice suggest that distributive, procedural and interactional justice predict organizational commitment (Allen & Meyer, 1990;Jason A. Colquitt et al, 2001;Folger & Konovsky, 1989). The same is applicable for conflict management which is an antecedent to project performance (Chan et al, 2004) and it has been suggested in prior research that organisational justice can be useful in difficult conversation or in delivering bad news (Lavelle, Folger, & Manegold, 2016;Richter, König, Koppermann, & Schilling, 2016).…”

Displaying fairness while delivering bad news: Testing the effectiveness of organizational bad news training in the layoff context.

“…Research has shown that messengers' concerns about giving bad news are manifold, and include feelings of guilt toward those suffering from bad news (Tesser & Rosen, 1972), fears of negative evaluations and self-presentation concerns of being associated with bad news (Bond & Anderson, 1987), and anticipation of negative reactions of the recipients (Rosen & Tesser, 1970). In line with these findings, giving bad news to an employee can create considerable stress in managers, whether it pertains to the communication of negative hiring decisions or to the delivery of layoff news (e.g., Folger & Skarlicki, 1998;Lavelle et al, 2014). In some cases, for instance if managers do not support the decisions they have to convey (e.g., conducting a layoff due to downsizing rather than performance deficits), doing harm to an employee may also contradict a manager's role expectation of being a "good" supervisor who aspires to promote and support his or her employees (Kets de Vries & Balazs, 1997).…”

“…-(George Clooney alias Ryan Bingham in the motion picture Up in the Air by Dubiecki, Clifford, Reitman, & Reitman, 2009) Giving bad news to an employee is as much a regular task for managers as it is a difficult one (Bies, 2013). Managers have to communicate not only organizational downsizing and layoffs (Clair & Dufresne, 2004), but also negative performance feedback (Ilgen & Davis, 2000), pay cuts (Greenberg, 1990), negative hiring (Lavelle, Folger, & Manegold, 2014) or promotion decisions (Lemons & Jones, 2001), or disciplinary warnings (Cole & Latham, 1997). What all these conversations have in common is the stress they arouse in managers and employees alike: Employees feel threatened by bad news because it impairs their self-esteem and creates uncertainty about their future (e.g., Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001), and managers feel uncomfortable with their responsibility for giving this news and thus doing harm to the employee (e.g., Molinsky & Margolis, 2005).…”

Effective, but not all the time: Experimental evidence on the effectiveness of a code of ethics' design

“…We used the vignette technique to present two typical real‐life ethical–economic decision dilemma scenarios (see Kotzian et al, 2016; Lavelle et al, 2016; Oll et al, 2018 for applications). By describing a situation and asking for a decision intention, the technique comes as close as possible to actual decision making.…”