Dr. Sean Valentine, Chair and Professor of Management, and Dr. Connie Bateman, Chair and Professor of Marketing, presented their paper at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Southern Management Association

Research Highlight: Dr. Sean Valentine, Chair and Professor of Management, and Dr. Connie Bateman, Chair and Professor of Marketing, presented their paper “An Eye for an Eye at Work – Unethical Contexts, Employee Victimization, and Retaliation” at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Southern Management Association

Authors: Sean Valentine (University of North Dakota), Robert Giacalone (Texas State University), Connie Bateman (University of North Dakota), Patricia Meglich (University of Nebraska Omaha)
Conference: 2025 Annual Meeting of the Southern Management Association, Greenville, South Carolina, October 21-25, 2025
Paper Title: An Eye for an Eye at Work: Unethical Context in Organizations and Employee Victimization and Retaliation

Abstract:
An unethical context in organizations can encourage employees to exhibit a callous disregard for their coworkers’ well-being. Such a mindset can lead them to victimize colleagues, thus contaminating worker relations in ways that motivate reciprocal misbehaviors directed at others and elevating the toxicity found in the workplace. Given these concerns, the purpose of this phenomenon-driven study was to investigate how an unethical organizational context prompts employee victimization, comprised of work polyvictimization and alienation, and employee retaliation, occurring as work vengeance and bullying others at work. Time-lagged data were collected from a large panel of working adults, with the results showing that unethical organizational context, work polyvictimization, work alienation, work vengeance, and bullying others at work were positively interrelated both directly and indirectly. The findings have implications for theory development and suggest that firms focus on developing policies that build ethical work environments and discourage employees from mistreating their coworkers.