Healing the wounds of injustice : the effectiveness of writing interventions on the physiological, psychological, and behavioral consequences of workplace mistreatment

Workplace injustice can have profound negative effects on victims’ physical and psychological health and their behavior [i.e. behaviour] on the job. To date, organizational justice research has tended to focus on various forms of retaliatory reactions (e.g., theft, sabotage, reducing one’s effort, badmouthing the organization and/or the boss), all of which can have negative implications for the individual and the organization. Research in the trauma and coping literature has demonstrated that writing interventions (i.e., guided expressive writing) can have beneficial effects for victims by giving them the opportunity to vent emotions and seek meaning in the event. In this dissertation, I explore the question: Can victims of workplace unfairness "heal the wounds" of injustice, defined in terms of reducing the negative physiological, psychological, and behavioral consequences associated with unfairness, by writing about the experience? Specifically, I (a) replicate previous writing interventions to experiences of organizational injustice, (b) extend the intervention to consider fairness-related outcomes (i.e., victim’s anger and retaliation), and (c) test whether incremental benefits derive from including perspective taking (i.e., considering the transgressor’s perspective) in the writing intervention. Replicating procedures from previous research (e.g., Pennebaker & Beall, 1986), participants wrote about an unfair workplace experience for 20 minutes/day across four days in one of four conditions: emotions only, thoughts only, both emotions/thoughts, or a control condition. Three additional conditions were introduced involving perspective taking. Consistent with previous research, the emotions and thoughts intervention provided the highest benefits to psychological well-being (i.e., general life satisfaction). Anger decreased in all replication conditions, whereas retaliation intentions tended to vary across conditions. The results indicated that perspective taking did not provide additional benefits to victims’ outcomes over and above the emotions/thoughts condition. Although the perspective taking intervention resulted in less anger and fewer intentions to retaliate over time, the predicted changes regarding lower attributions of blame or greater compassion toward the transgressor were not observed. The emotions/thoughts condition was found to be the most effective intervention, showing the strongest and most pervasive impact across the dependent variables.Business, Sauder School ofGraduat