Putting a Spotlight on the Ostracizer: Intentional Workplace Ostracism Motives

Abstract

Workplace ostracism is a prevalent and detrimental type of mistreatment. To curtail this harmful behavior, researchers need to identify who is more likely to intentionally ostracize others at work and the motives that drive them to do so. Past reviews of workplace ostracism focus primarily on the outcomes of ostracism, and the few that address the antecedents often examine a limited set of variables. We examined themes in the ostracism literature and determined that employees intentionally ostracize others due to either punitive or defensive motives. Punitive motives are focused on protecting the interests of the group, whereas defensive motives pertain to defending the interests of the self. We present a model of the ostracizer based on these motives and the associated perceptions of threat and negative emotions that precipitate ostracism. Our model provides an extension of the workplace ostracism literature by presenting a testable theoretical framework, rooted in appraisal theory, to explain why and when employees are likely to ostracize others at work. We also provided suggestions for an expansion of the ostracizer motives literature, with the goal of encouraging research that provides greater understanding of the perspective of the ostracizer.

Dynamic and Multi-Party Approaches to Interpersonal Workplace Mistreatment Research

“…Second, the articles in this Special Issue contribute insights into how the motivation to engage in interpersonal workplace mistreatment may result from an interplay of both contextual and individual factors. For example, the finding that perceived threats to self or one’s group can trigger mistreatment responses (Henle, Shore, Morton, & Conroy 2022) implies that organizational contexts that heighten individual feelings of uncertainty and powerlessness may be fertile breeding grounds for acts of workplace mistreatment. Such heightened uncertainty can, for example, be triggered by unstable employment, variable pay, and excessive competition between employees.…”

Employee innovative behavior and workplace wellbeing: Leader support for innovation and coworker ostracism as mediators

“…By contrast, coworkers who are set in their ways and do not innovate will seem conservative and inactive, which can lead to lowered self-evaluations ( Buunk and Gibbons, 2007 ). Thus, to mitigate the threat of contrast effects due to upward comparisons, individuals may motivate defensive ostracism ( Liu et al, 2019 ; Henle et al, 2022 ). Specifically, employees who exhibit more innovative behavior compared with their peers are perceived to be outliers, which may cause their exclusion from the team’s “one of us” classification system ( Breidenthal et al, 2020 ).…”

Helping an Attractive Group that Ostracized Me: An Experimental Vignette Study

“…Whereas intrapersonal threats reduce one's capacity to alleviate social fear, interpersonal threats—such as negative group evaluations—increase one's perception of environmental antagonism (Heeren et al., 2012). Additionally, the low‐intensity, counter‐normative, and attributionally ambiguous nature of ostracism makes it a unique contributor to experiences of anxiety at work as victims find it difficult to assess intentionality to these experiences (Ferris et al., 2017; Fiset & Robinson, 2018; Henle et al., 2022). This general lack of clarity is a key contextual feature of ambivalent social relations in which group members are sources of both negativity and positivity.…”