Emotions and Organizational Governance

Moments of impulse punctuate the flow of life experience in every domain of life. Almost all research on impulse, though, has been limited to those that occur in relation to activities of consumption, such as buying, eating, and sexual activity (Lewis, 2013). Very little research has been devoted to understanding impulses that occur in organizational and work contexts. In particular, there have been no previous studies of the impulse to harm a coworker. Since impulses are purported to lie in the phenomenological and conceptual space between emotion and action, the dearth of research on work-related malicious impulses leaves a sizeable gap between studies of workplace aggression (e.g., Barling, Dupré, & Kelloway, 2009; Gibson & Callister, 2010; Hershcovis et al., 2007), and work-related anger (e.g., Collett & Lizardo, 2010; Domagalski & Steelman, 2007; Sloan, 2004). Our purpose in this chapter is to probe the concept of “impulse,” and its connection to other concepts and phenomena. We do this by focusing on the impulse to harm a coworker, which we label maliciousness, and by focusing on the relation between hierarchical position at work, or supervisory level, and malicious impulses toward others at work.

While workplace violence has been a topic of considerable interest to scholars, more subtle acts of aggression in workplaces can also take a profound emotional toll (Einarsen, 2000). These mundane or subtle forms of aggression, such as a verbal slight (Andersson & Pearson, 1999) may escalate to violence. Subtle forms of indirect aggression that may stem from maliciousness include making negative statements about someone’s work or personal life behind their backs, ignoring someone, or refusing to give credit to someone. More direct forms of aggression include condescending and demeaning comments, reprimanding someone publicly, or insulting and yelling at others as means of settling disputes (Dormann & Zapf, 2002). If maliciousness, or the impulse to act with malice, underlies or precedes many of these actions, it is important to understand these impulses.

IMPULSE AND SUPERVISORY POSITION

A prevailing concern in the literature on work behavior is how workplace incivility, aggression, and abuse are related to hierarchical position (Bruk-Lee & Spector, 2006; Hershcovis et al., 2007). We focus on the association between hierarchical position and maliciousness. On the one hand, there are reasons to expect that malicious propensities can result from holding a position of limited power. For instance, some previous work has suggested that those in the lowest status positions might be the most prone to engaging in actual harmful acts toward others (Gilligan, 1996); typical reasons for this association are that those on the lowest rungs of the occupational ladder are more likely to experience direct supervisory control over their work, disproportionate criticism from coworkers, and humiliating or demeaning comments (de Beijl, 1990). However, on the other hand, there are also reasons to expect that the relationship between maliciousness and supervisory level may be non-linear and contain particular nuances that rival this overall association.

Extant research has, for the most part, assumed an oversimplified linear relationship between occupational position and anger. While such an assumption may be appropriate for assessing aggression, where it may indeed be most prevalent among those at lower levels in organizations (Gilligan, 1996), anger has also been observed to be more prevalent among those higher in organizations (Collett & Lizardo, 2010). These opposing associations point to tensions that contradict our understanding of anger as one form of felt disposition to aggress, and run counter to the strong statistical association between anger and aggression (Anderson & Bushman, 2002; Averill, 1983; Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter, & Ng, 2001; Fox & Spector, 1999; Gibson & Callister, 2010; Hershcovis et al., 2007; Martinko, Gundlach, & Douglas, 2002). This association may be stronger in some social locations than others. Discrepancies between impulses and aggression can be substantially attributed to social controls in the workplace, and self-control (Kovach & De Lancey, 2005) that restrain impulsive behavior. We expect that the tensions implicit in those association will be more fully revealed in the relation between malicious workplace impulses and position in occupational hierarchies; more precisely, we hypothesize that middle-level supervisors will be especially likely to report an impulse to harm a coworker than other workers. That is, we expect middle-level supervisors will be more malicious than top-level supervisors, adding a nuance to the hierarchical structuring of anger, and will be more malicious than lower level workers, adding a contingency to the literature on workplace aggression.

Middle-level supervisors represent a compelling group of workers for several reasons. First, they find themselves located in an arduous and “contradictory” (Wright, 1997) position between upper-level management and front-line or lower level workers. Though they possess some access to power and resources within an organization (Wooldridge, Schmid, & Floyd, 2008), they are themselves supervised workers and often share little decision-making power in organizational structures (Bolton & Houlihan, 2010). Accordingly, middle-level supervisors are subjected to a “double exposure” of stress: they are simultaneously subject to the demands of upper management and the antagonism from those they are responsible for supervising, all while exerting little or no influence over company policy (Muntaner et al., 2010). This may make supervisors at this level more vulnerable to anger, and ultimately more prone to feel impulses to harm others.

The contradictions involving middle-level supervisors are especially profound. For example, although the corporate manager is “understood as an embodiment of perfect rationality” (Flam, 2002a, 2002b, p. 93), managers are often required to operate under conditions of uncertainty, where the opportunity for reasoning is limited. Though not drawing explicit attention to the middle-level supervisor, research on supervisors in general suggests that they are often called upon to cope with the uncertainty created by the absence of clear loyalties, and often insufficient, ambiguous, or unreliable information from their subordinates and bosses (Jackall, 1988; Taylor & Kluemper, 2012). In the face of ambiguity and uncertainty, managers in contradictory positions may feel called upon to use anger to assert their authority. However, the authority of a middle-level supervisor is tenuous at best and may need to be repeatedly negotiated (Harding, Lee, & Ford, 2014), which can take an emotional and cognitive toll. This toll is likely to be magnified by the frequent role conflicts and conflicting demands to which middle managers are exposed (Thomas & Linstead, 2002; Wright, 1982). These ambiguities predict aggression (Fast, Halevy, & Galinsky, 2012) and may also portend maliciousness. We expect that the toll will be expressed in their level of maliciousness. This leads us to our first hypothesis:

Hypothesis 1. Middle-level supervisors will be more malicious than other workers.

THEORIZING THE HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURING OF MALICIOUSNESS: SOME INSIGHTS FROM BOURDIEU

We use Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework as a vehicle for exploring and expanding the ideas about impulse and structural position outlined above. Bourdieu’s (1990) theory is especially fruitful for studying emotion because it provides a linkage between emotions and impulses arising in the physical body and social structure, both of which are central to the experience of emotions. Although Bourdieu never explicitly attended to emotions in social life (Steinmetz, 2006), his concept of habitus can be extrapolated to link individual emotional impulses and displays to systems of domination and power inequalities.

For Bourdieu, the habitus “presupposes a cultural and social habitat that becomes internalized in the form of behavioral dispositions to think, to reason, to perceive, and even to feel in a certain way” (Von Scheve & von Luede, 2005, p. 320, emphasis added). Put another way, the habitus refers to deeply ingrained habits, skills, or dispositions that we possess as a result of our life experiences. Bourdieu (1990) argued that the habitus represents the internalization of the “logic of practice” that governs a particular institution. Although he argued that habitus is typically of cognitive origin and reflected in the realm of thoughts, he also noted that the emotional components of habitus encompass conformity to positional norms within a particular field, and access to certain kinds of resources, or “capital.”

Expanding upon Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Burkitt (2014, p. 118) explicated the concept of “emotional habitus,” which is composed of “the values that are embodied in feelings and emotions…in the field of relations between capitals and the divisions and distinctions between social groups that they mark out, which intervene between individuals and the social world” (emphasis added). These ideas inform our thinking about the distribution of impulses to harm a coworker across various supervisory levels. The emotional habitus is shaped, in part, by learning which emotions are appropriate for expression to clients, supervisors, and subordinates (Rafaeli & Sutton, 1987) and learning how to reconcile or control personal emotions with the demands of a particular position in the field (Creed, DeJordy, & Lok, 2010). Notions of what is appropriate and inappropriate with regards to emotional context in an organizational setting help generate self-imposed limits on emotional expression or actions that would largely be driven by these emotions. The idea of an emotional habitus suggests that emotions “involve a sense of how to act, how to play the game that is never altogether conscious or purely reducible to rules – even when it seems strategic” (Calhoun, 2001, p. 53, emphasis added). This does not mean that everyone in a particular field will adopt an identical habitus; rather, they will, to a lesser or greater extent, conform to the dominant institutional order, which clearly delineate emotional display rules.

For Bourdieu, the “logic of practice” or “feel for the game” are properties of a social context or “field” in which an individual finds themselves in. A field, in the Bourdieusian sense, can be defined as a, “terrain of contestation between occupants of positions differentially endowed with the resources necessary for gaining and safeguarding an ascendant position within that terrain” (Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008, p. 6) that arises from struggles for domination. A workplace, then, is a prime example of a field as Bourdieu conceptualized it. Considered within the context of the workplace, an organization is a space where different hierarchical positions afford differential amounts of power and resources. The logic of practice defines “boundaries” of that particular field by issuing both implicit and explicit rules, of which emotional management may be one. Boundaries are sometimes crossed unintentionally, as other participants in the field change their frame of the field, or the “game” being played. This can lead to a disruption of habitus and reactive impulses.

More importantly, from the perspective of our interest in supervisory-level effects, Bourdieu emphasized that it is not just fields, but positions within fields that shape habitus. The habitus gives rise to or leads to a sense of what actions and behaviors are possible based on occupational position, and the effect of positional emotion norms and expectations of rationality. This helps us further theorize the relation between maliciousness and anger. Since anger is typically felt as a “hot” emotion that frequently motivates aggressive or vengeful action (Wilkowski, Meier, Robinson, Carter, & Feltman, 2009), one form of maliciousness can be considered “hot maliciousness.” In other situations, when workers or supervisors feel a press to maintain rationality (Flam, 2002a, 2002b), “cool maliciousness” may arise. Cool maliciousness may be either a manifestation of repressed anger, or part of what is perceived to be of logical necessity. The latter form of “cool” malicious impulse might be rationalized by the belief that punishment of subordinates or wrong-doers is an acceptable management strategy (Butterfield, Trevino, & Ball, 1996). Moreover, as the concept of value-rationality suggests (Weber, Henderson, & Parsons, 1964), an impulse may be cool because it is removed from its value base, but still motivated by perceived self-interest, or feelings about one’s position in an organizational hierarchy (Magee & Galinsky, 2008) that are perceived to be rational. The perception of rationality in these cases may arise from the perceived need to enforce organizational efficacy though aggression.

Bourdieu’s theory, then, conceives of an individual worker as embedded within an institutional milieu that “shapes his or her subjectivity, yet is still potentially amenable to being affected by the agent” (Voronov & Vince, 2012, p. 60); this allows us to assess both individual and collective aspects of emotions within organizations. Viewed in this light, conceptualizing workers as possessing a habitus that is composed of situationally governed dispositions allows researchers to avoid falling into the trap of having only static and one-dimensional accounts of organizational hierarchies and emotional responses and to infuse dynamism into organizational culture, which better captures the contentious power game between different agents at various levels of the organization (Ozbilgin, Tatli, & Nord, 2005).

Considered carefully, Bourdieu’s account of habitus does not suggest deterministic or exact course of actions (Sweetman, 2003) in every situation, but provides a “feel” or a “sense of playing the game” (Calhoun, 1995, p. 145) for which actions or behaviors may be appropriate within given social contexts. In other words, the habitus is never fully predictable. The notion that one’s thoughts, actions, and dispositions can be decentered during “critical moments when [habitus] misfires or is out of phase” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 162) provides one route to impulses within organizational contexts. The structuring of situational habitus (i.e., the habitus common for a person in a specific position in a situation), and which may in turn be structured by organizational factors, provides another route for impulses to follow. Altogether, the concept of “habitus” provides a touchstone for theorizing the indeterminate aspects of emotions, affect, and impulse.

DATA AND METHOD

Sample

Our analyses of the data are meant to aid in the exploration of our theoretical ideas presented. The data utilized in this study are from 767 residents of the Greater Toronto Area, aged 18–70 (445 women), who participated in telephone interviews conducted in late 2004 and early 2005, and who reported that they worked at least twenty hours per week in the month prior to their interview, excluding self-employed with no subordinates. This analytic sample is a subset of an initial sample of all residents (n = 1,404) generated by randomly sampling telephone numbers from a complete list of all residential numbers in the Greater Toronto Area (i.e., list-assisted random digit dialing). Only English-speaking residents were interviewed. The response rate among eligible respondents, calculated with a formula specified by the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) (2013), is 84%.

Average personal yearly income and education in the sample are similar to the averages for the general population of Toronto. The sample average income for men is about $70,000 (interpolated from the ordinal categorical reports), and this matches the 2006 Census average income among male workers in Toronto ($69,912) (Statistics Canada, 2006b). The average income of women in the sample, of just above $50,000, is slightly higher than the Census average earned income for women in Toronto ($48,881). The mean educational level in the sample is “some university,” which is consistent with Census data that indicate about two-thirds of the adult population of Toronto has some post-secondary schooling (Statistics Canada, 2006a).

The representativeness of the sample may seem surprising, given that the sampling frame is limited to residential phone numbers. However, when the data were collected in 2004–2005, 94% of all households had a land-line, only 4.8% of all households reported having only a cell phone, and only 1.2% did not have any phone (Statistics Canada, 2006c). In addition, an effort was made to increase respondent agreement to be interviewed and reduce dropout by reducing respondent burden (i.e., the length of the interview and number of questions). This produced a representative sample, but also led to some measurement limitations.

Measures

The section of the interview assessing job characteristics and experiences began with the statement: “If you currently hold more than one job, I want you to tell me about the job that you work more hours at in the typical week.”

The Impulse to Harm a Coworker

The impulse to harm a coworker is assessed by a yes/no question: “During the past month did you feel an impulse to hurt someone you work with in some way, including hurting their reputation, or hurting them emotionally or physically?” This item was intentionally phrased to encompass both overt aggression and indirect social aggression (Averill, 1983; Dyches & Mayeux, 2012; Richardson & Green, 1999). The question combines both overt aggression and indirect aggression in order to reduce risk of item non-response or false negatives that might be elicited by questions solely about overt aggression. Since the term “someone at work” encompasses supervisors, subordinates, and same level colleagues, the impulse refers to all coworkers, broadly defined.

Supervisory Level

All job characteristics, including supervisory level, are assessed for the respondents’ main job, defined by hours worked per week. Supervisory level is assessed by three questions: “Does someone supervise your work?”; “Do you manage the work of others?”; and “Are you an employee or self-employed?” Upper-level supervisors are defined as those who supervise others and are not themselves supervised, and those who are self-employed and supervise someone. Middle-level supervisors are defined as those who both supervise others and who are also supervised. Since almost half of the 163 self-employed respondents (n = 75) supervise no one, a separate indicator variable identifies that group.

Anger about Work

Anger about work is assessed by asking, “From [date one month before interview inserted] to today, about how often did you feel angry about work?” The response scale is: “all of the time, most of the time, some of the time, a little of the time, or none of the time.” The past-month time frame is recent enough that minor episodes of anger may be recalled, but long enough to capture anger about events that may occur infrequently, such as “disconfirmation” of one’s identity by a subordinate (e.g., non-compliance by a subordinate).

Perceived Job Stress and Job-Related Factors Associated with Stress

Perceived job stress was assessed by the question, “From [date one month ago inserted] to today, about how often did you feel stress about work?” Four of the job-related factors associated with stress that are included as controls are assessed by asking for level of agreement with the statements below, where agreement is assessed on a five-point response scale where 1 means very little and 5 means very much. The statements are: “I have to deal with conflicting demands on my job”; “My job requires a lot of physical effort”; “My job requires a high level of skill”; “I have good job security.” Some of these variables, such as job security, are included because low levels are conceptualized as stressors. These variables are not reverse coded because adding them as controls directly has the same effect as adding their reverse coded forms as controls.

The same coding logic applies to measures of job control, which are also included because low job control is conceptualized as a stressor. Two dimensions of job control are assessed. One measure of job control is a scale assessing control over the timing of work and work tasks. Scale items were introduced as follows: “Think of a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 means very little and 5 means very much. On this scale, how much choice do you have in: … determining when you begin and end each workday or each work-week? …determining the number of hours you work each week? …deciding to work at home instead of your usual place of employment? … deciding when you can take a few hours off? …deciding when you can take vacation or days off?” The association among the items is strong, and a factor analysis of the items confirms that all load on a single factor (alpha reliability = 0.80). The standardized factor score of the five items (mean = 0, SD = 1), calculated using the data from all workers, including the self-employed non-supervisors in the sample excluded from in the analyses, is used in these analyses. The other measure of job control is a single-item measure of job decision latitude, assessed by asking for level of agreement with the statement: “I have the freedom to decide how to do my job.”

Baseline Demographic Controls

Baseline demographic factors are included as controls to account for factors that are likely to influence selection into a supervisory-level position. Age was assessed by subtracting the year of interview from self-reported year of birth. Education was assessed by the question: “What is the highest level of education that you have completed?” Responses were coded into the following ordinal categories: (1) grade school; (2) some high school; (3) high school; (4) some community college or technical school; (5) diploma or certificate from community college or technical school; (6) some university; (7) bachelor’s or undergraduate degree; (8) some graduate school; (9) graduate degree. Analyses (not shown) indicate that schooling can be treated as continuous in these analyses.

Additional Job-Related Controls

In addition to the variables noted above, the final model includes controls for variables that describe jobs, specifically number of hours that the respondent worked per week, income, and job support. These variables are included as additional controls to obtain estimates after basic dimensions of jobs are controlled, to determine whether the findings are robust, and persist when aspects of job quality are controlled. Working hours were assessed by asking, “How many hours did you work for pay in a typical week during the past month?” Exploratory analyses, including locally weighted least-squares (Cleveland, 1993), indicate that a log (10) transformation best captures the effect of work hours.

Yearly personal income is an ordinal measure assessed by self-report. Respondents were asked to report their income in the past year using categories starting with “less than $20,000” and advancing in $20,000 increments, with the highest level assessed being “$200,000 or more.” Data on personal income is missing for 4.4% (n = 34) of the respondents. Income values for those respondents were imputed using the multiple imputation procedure (M = 100) in Stata (StataCorp, 2011). The mean income category is between $40,001 and $60,000.

Job support (from supervisors and coworkers) was assessed by asking respondents to use the same response scale to rate their agreement with the statements: “My supervisor is helpful in getting the job done” and “The people I work with help me to get my job done.” Analyses that include these controls do not muddy the water since results without these controls are also presented.

RESULTS

Descriptive Statistics and Correlations

Descriptive statistics for all study variables are presented in Table 1. Associations of supervisory level with all other variables are presented in Table 2.

Table 1. Description of Study Variables (n = 767).

Table 2. Mean and Percentage of All Variables, and Tests of Differences across Supervisory-Level Groups (n = 767).

Baseline Effects of Supervisory Level on Impulse to Harm a Coworker

The results from logistic regression analyses are presented in Table 3. The first column of coefficients (Model 1) indicates that middle-level supervisors are more likely to report the impulse to harm a coworker than are non-supervisory employees (b = 0.83, OR = 2.28, 95%, CI = 1.22–4.27). That is, the estimated odds of reporting maliciousness are more than twice as high among middle-level supervisors than non-supervisory workers. This association is also apparent in the zero-order relationship between supervisory level and maliciousness (i.e., without controls for age, gender and education) presented in Table 2. Thus, we find support for Hypothesis 1. However, the results are also partially inconsistent with this hypothesis in that there is no significant difference between middle-level and top-level supervisors. This lack of difference between those two groups can be observed in the coefficients in the table. The coefficient for the contrast between middle-level supervisors and non-supervisory workers (b = 0.83 in the first column of results) is not significantly larger than the coefficient for the contrast between middle-level supervisors and non-supervisory workers (b = 0.60). Neither are the coefficients for those two groups significantly different in Models 2 through 4. However, results from the subsequent analysis, that include additional controls, suggest greater complexity. Those results are discussed in greater detail after the results relevant to Hypothesis 3.

Table 3. Estimated Effects (Logit) of Supervisory Position on Impulse to Harm a Coworker.

Adding Controls for Anger about Work and Job Stress

Hypotheses 2 and 3 posit that anger about work and job stress, respectively, will reduce the association between supervisory level and malicious impulses. Hypothesis 3 is evaluated by comparing supervisory-level coefficients from Model 1 to Model 2, after anger about work is controlled. The size of the coefficient for middle-level supervisors, which indicates the contrast between middle-level supervisors and non-supervisory workers, is almost as large (93% of the size) when anger is controlled, as without that control. This is not a substantively meaningful change, or a statistically significant change. Thus, Hypothesis 2 is not supported. Hypothesis 3 is evaluated twice, first in Model 3 by controlling for perceived stress, and then in Model 4 by controlling perceived stress and work-related variables identified as being indicative of stress (e.g., job control is included in that group because low control is a stressor). The coefficient for middle-level supervisory status is stable across those analyses, and thus Hypothesis 3 is not supported.

Adding Controls for Job Characteristics

Even in the final model that includes controls for a wide range of job-related factors, including work hours and income, the contrast between middle-level supervisors and non-supervisory workers still remains statistically significant. In this model, the coefficient indicating the contrast between top-level supervisors and non-supervisory workers, which was of borderline two-tailed statistical significance in Model 2, is substantially smaller, and the difference between middle-level and top-level supervisors becomes statistically significant (p < .05) in that model, in a one-tailed test. Hours worked per week is the only variable added in Model 5 that has a relevant significant effect (support from their own supervisors is not relevant to the contrast between middle-level supervisors and top-level supervisors, since top-level supervisors are by definition coded zero on that variable). The results indicate that once the higher number of hours worked by top-level than middle-level supervisors are taken into consideration, there is some support for Hypothesis 2. However, multiple tests of that hypothesis in models with different control variables make that support equivocal.

A serendipitous finding that should be noted is that younger workers are more likely to report malicious impulses toward coworkers than older workers (logit coefficient for age b = −.03, se = 0.01, p < .05). When anger about work is controlled, that unanticipated age difference is reduced, and no longer statistically significant. In contrast, controlling for job stress does not reduce the age difference. The results suggest that the negative effect of age on maliciousness may be explained by decreasing anger about work with age, but more extensive analysis is needed to explicate this finding, which is beyond the scope of this chapter.

DISCUSSION

The effects of structural position on workplace anger, aggression, and conflict have been investigated in previous studies (Aquino, 2000; Collett & Lizardo, 2010; Medina, Munduate, & Guerra, 2008). However, no previous study has investigated supervisory-level differences in workplace maliciousness. Indeed, no study has investigated whether middle-level supervisors are more angry or aggressive than non-supervisory workers, let alone more likely to be malicious toward coworkers. Our results provide support for the hypothesis that middle-level supervisors report more malicious intent than non-supervisory workers (Hypothesis 1). This finding adds to the growing literature on the uniqueness of middle-level supervisory position (Bolton & Houlihan, 2010; Harding et al., 2014; Sharma & Good, 2013) in the occupational hierarchy.

The results provide weaker and more conditional support for the idea that middle-level supervisors are more malicious than top-level supervisors. The statistical significance and magnitude of the contrast between top-level and middle-level supervisors are dependent on which other variables indicating job characteristics were controlled. When fairly comprehensive measures of job characteristics are added as controls, the difference between middle-level and top-level supervisors in maliciousness is statistically significant. In contrast, in baseline analyses there is no significant difference between those two groups. Moreover, controlling for job-related anger and stress does not substantially alter baseline effects. Thus, Hypotheses 2 and 3, which predict mediating effects of anger and stress, are not supported.

Since none of the variables included in the analyses explain the relationship between supervisory level and maliciousness (i.e., none reduce the relationship to non-significance), we offer only speculation on the processes involved, taking our cue from the findings of previous research. Interpersonal conflicts, and especially conflicts that involve the perception of interactional injustice, underlie much “hot” maliciousness, as it does aggression (Kennedy, Homant, & Homant, 2004). Most prior research on aggression, though, has not investigated its relation to perceived injustice, or supervisor level. Studies that have investigated the stratification of aggression have produced equivocal results. One study found workers to be more likely to be aggressive toward their immediate supervisor or coworkers than toward subordinates, or other (e.g., higher level) supervisors (Baron, Neuman, & Geddes, 1999). However, studies of victimization (Aquino, 2000; Lamertz & Aquino, 2004) and petty tyranny (Kant, Skogstad, Torsheim, & Einarsen, 2013), suggest that maliciousness is also frequently directed down the occupational hierarchy. This latter pattern also overlaps with research on anger (Collett & Lizardo, 2010), which also suggests that anger is more likely to be directed downward than upward. Ironically, the inconsistency of results of research on factors like aggression, victimization, and anger is consistent with the complex pattern we observe in the relationship between maliciousness and supervisory level, and resonates with the idea that maliciousness lies in a complex conceptual and ontological space (Martin, Knopoff, & Beckman, 1998).

The results presented above indicate that the flow of maliciousness in the workplace tends to occur more from the middle down than in a uniform top-down or bottom-up direction. This is a novel and important finding. Moreover, the results indicate that much of the excess maliciousness of middle-level supervisors exists independent of anger about work, and job stress. The independence of the supervisory-level effect from anger is surprising because anger has been shown to be a strong predictor of aggression in previous research (Bordia, Restubog, & Tang, 2008; Folger & Skarlicki, 1998; Hershcovis et al., 2007; Martinko et al., 2002). These findings suggest that it is important to more thoroughly theorize maliciousness that is independent of anger and stress, and that is directed from the middle downward in the occupational hierarchy. In particular, it is important to consider how anger-independent maliciousness has been institutionalized and rationalized.

The independence of the effect of supervisory level on maliciousness from anger about work suggests that the impulse to harm a coworker frequently occurs without anger, and may be experienced as a “rational impulse.” For example, a supervisor may feel the impulse to fire or demote a subordinate, or otherwise aggressively respond to perceived subordinate incompetence (Fitness, 2000; Klaussner, 2014), justified by the perceived need to protect the organization and preserve organizational goals. In Bourdieu’s terms, the excess maliciousness of middle-level supervisors could be largely composed of impulses that maintain an organizational climate that fits with the emotional habitus of cool, seemingly unemotional professionalism that indicates that these workers have acquired a “feel for the game.”

Ethical Implications of the Results

It is worthwhile to consider the ethical implications of the plausible “cool maliciousness” among middle-level supervisors. As we noted above, one possibility that should be further investigated is if the impulses to harm are perceived by middle-level supervisors as being ethically justified. Several prominent theories in management ethics have claimed that individuals in positions of authority engage in deliberate and lengthy moral reasoning to respond to ethical issues (e.g., Sonenshein, 2007). However, the presence of “cool” malicious impulses may operate at levels below conscious and deliberate reasoning, allowing managers to act on their intuitive reactions only after developing post hoc moral reasons to explain or justify their decisions (Reynolds, 2006).

Post hoc justifications for the performance of malicious impulses may be especially potent when managers must make decisions that harm individual workers but are thought to be in the “best interests” of an organization. For example, just as the act of firing an incompetent worker may also be perceived as ethically justified through its consistency with meritocratic ideals, the impulse to take that action may be felt as justified. As noted above, actions based on emotion are often translated into rationalizations, which may fold back into emotions and impulses. For example, people may invoke meritocratic justifications for their impulses and choices to promote their own personal interests over the interests of the larger group, or to justify promoting the interests of the social groups to which they belong over the interests of other groups. Reciprocal processes of emotion and justification can expand beyond the immediate context so that, for instance, whole groups of workers (e.g., of specific ethnic or racial groups) become identified as incompetent (Moss & Tilly, 2001; Wilson, 1996), justifying malice toward them. The impulses, emotions, and rationalizations in these cases may be subtle, or “banal” (Arendt, 2006), supporting mundane maliciousness.

In addition to structural factors that might especially motivate maliciousness among middle-level supervisors, maliciousness may also be influenced by the structure of opportunities. One advantageous opportunity often afforded to middle-level supervisors (in an otherwise stress-ridden role) is the opportunity to blame upper-level management for policies, assignments, and decisions that harm workers (e.g., policies around confidentiality in promotion decisions may protect decision-makers from accusations of maliciousness). The ability to blame upper management may help middle-level supervisors to conceal their maliciousness, and protect them against retribution. Structures that protect supervisors from being identified as the source of malicious acts may promote their disposition to aggress (Anderson & Bushman, 2002; Fox & Spector, 1999; Goldstein, 1994), and thus may also promote their maliciousness.

Bourdieusian Theory: Directions for Future Research

In moving toward the development of theory that could explain our results, we find Bourdieu’s (1997, p. 56) discussion of symbolic and cultural capital particularly illuminating. Bourdieu defined symbolic capital as a relationship of misrecognition and recognition (emphasis added). Symbolic capital is derived from, “culturally significant attributes such as prestige, status, and authority” (Mahar, Harker, & Wilkes, 1990, p. 13). Formal position, or supervisory status, may not always convert into expected levels of symbolic capital, manifest as respect or recognition of authority. Bourdieu’s theory, in turn, encourages us to consider how habitus is generated by access to capitals, and anchored in practices that characterize fields, such as practices of recognition (e.g., identity confirmation) in workplaces.

An analysis of practices of identity confirmation and identity disconfirmation provide a means for further exploring the development of malicious impulses from a Bourdieusian perspective. Identity disconfirmation represents an instance of the failure of the conversion of a resource (e.g., institutionally legitimated position) into symbolic capital. This can undermine the strength of institutional norms around emotional restraint. Symbolic capital allows individuals to distinguish themselves from others through social recognition, status, or esteem − all of which flow from having an identity of power confirmed and reinforced. In general, people act to maintain well-established identities and seek consistency between their identities and actions, and others actions toward them (Burke & Stets, 2009).

Identity confirmation is frequently uncertain when others are afforded the opportunity to accept or reject the performance of identity being offered (Miles, 2014). Conceivably, if the identities of middle-level supervisors are not confirmed because of ambiguous authority, they may feel like taking actions against those others. Those feelings may be intermittent or impulsive. Such impulses may be bound to strategies people adopt when coping with threats to the self (Burke, 1996) in contexts or settings that demand emotional and behavioral restraint. When impulses are analyzed in relation to stress coping and norms, the connection between Bourdieusian theory and psychoanalytic theory are especially obvious (e.g., see Chancer, 2013).

Alongside a consideration of cultural capital, our emphasis on Bourdieu’s theory is an attempt to further explicate the structural perspective to understanding workplace impulses. From a structural perspective, it is important to ascertain what it is about the position of a middle-level supervisor in relation to other occupational ranks that may be subject to relatively high levels of identity disconfirmation. We think the answer lies in the fact that the middle-level supervisory identity is more likely to be ambiguous, in the sense that their power and prestige is more likely to be challenged, than the power and prestige typically afforded to workers in top-level positions, and those who do not hold supervisory positions. They only possess limited power to signal to others how they should be treated in the workplace (Lamont & Lareau, 1988). Disconfirmations may also be more salient to middle-level supervisors than to senior managers who have constructed more enduring managerial identity narratives over time (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000; Watson, 2008); it may be more difficult for middle-level supervisors to sustain coherent identity narratives (Ainsworth & Hardy, 2004) when challenged, though it has been suggested that middle-level supervisors can employ a range of strategies to minimize identity discordant elements and create identities that reduces inconsistencies and contradictions (Taylor, 2005).

Structured practices that may shape maliciousness in workplaces may include management practices, such as performance review. For middle-level supervisors in particular, providing negative feedback in a performance review of a subordinate or peer may expose them to more retaliation and hostility from the recipient of the review (Geddes & Baron, 1997) than others in the workplace because the allegiances associated with their contradictory location are split. Middle-level supervisors have less “distance” between themselves and their subordinates, and split allegiances could result in violating expectations of support to coworkers or close subordinates because of a simultaneous obligation to upper management. However, the dynamic interplay between structural constraints and agency (power and authority) seems to produce discrepancies frequently enough for them to feel a higher rate of maliciousness than others.

In probing these processes more deeply from a theoretical perspective, we consider a second form of capital central in Bourdieu’s theorizing – cultural capital. For Bourdieu (1997), cultural capital derives its value from accessing and mobilizing valued cultural products – such as having the relevant educational credentials or certifications to hold a supervisory position, as well as knowing how to carry oneself and act in the presence of others in a particular occupational context. Thus, emotional intelligence (EI, Ashkanasy & Daus, 2002; Daus and Ashkanasy, 2003) and emotion work (Hochschild, 1979) both reflect specific forms of cultural capital. A worker with greater access to cultural capital in their field usually is in a position of dominance and power (Battilana, 2006). By virtue of training, EI is likely to become integrated into the dominated or expected emotional habitus. Emotionally intelligent individuals have a better grasp of which feelings should be expressed to coworkers, clients, and those that rank above them (Rafaeli & Sutton, 1987). In Bourdieu’s terms, the development of EI may be conceptualized in terms of capital development. The opportunity for this form of capital development is likely to vary across supervisory levels and institutional contexts.

Workplace contexts may not only provide the opportunity for capital development, but also to exercise what Zietsma and Lawrence (2010) term “embedded agency.” The practices that translate EI into effective emotion work can be understood as being motivated by embedded agency. Embedded agency has been theorized in the EI literature as the ability to “prevent, reduce, enhance, or modify an emotional response in oneself and others, as well as the ability to experience a range of emotions while making decisions about the appropriateness or usefulness of an emotion in a given situation” (Brackett, Rivers, & Salovey, 2011, p. 91). This agentic aspect of EI is akin to wisdom in that it “has as much to do with knowing when and how to express emotion as it does with controlling it” (Cherniss, 2000, p. 7).

Impulses may serve as signals to the emotionally intelligent about what emotions they should express, and which they should not express. The concept of EI can also be extended to link the person and the workplace environment together using a Bourdieusian frame by further specifying its relation to habitus. Like habitus, EI involves perceiving which emotions are expected or acceptable in a given context. The concept of EI, in our view, enriches the concept of habitus. Moreover, an attempt to consider emotion work, which frequently involves impulse restraint, without considering the emotional abilities (i.e., EI) of employees, would represent a limitation of a purely structural account for the effect of organizational position on maliciousness. Thus, a theory of EI that specifies how impulsive processes differ from moods, discrete emotions, and other forms of affect might be a promising direction for future research.

The broad conceptual connections outlined above have implications for future research on impulses and maliciousness. We have characterized the “middle-level supervisor” as a broad category to aid in the exploration of our theoretical approach, but which could encompass many different levels. For example, researchers might want to attend to the question of whether middle managers on different platforms of the occupational hierarchy who have high levels of EI are less malicious than those with low EI. If so, this might not simply be because different people have different abilities, but because EI is itself finely structured. In addition to studying how middle-level supervisors employ their somewhat limited embedded agency to strategically manage their own emotions and the emotions of those they supervise, research should also probe how institutional norms might make the exercise of EI necessary for the management of malicious impulses and behaviors. Emotional intelligence discourses that valorize self-control (and thus impulse restraint) may be part of the process. If so, these discourses might be understood as supporting an “upper-class” or “privileged” habitus that consists of “the refusal to surrender to nature, which is the mark of dominant groups – who start with self-control” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 40).

The inclusion of EI in training programs may circumvent some of these structural issues in organizations, since EI increases co-operation and fosters productivity (Diggins & Kandola, 2004; Goleman, 1995). While EI can certainly help employees navigate the murky and tumultuous waters of organizational life, even highly emotionally intelligent individuals are not immune to feeling or acting on impulse as a result of the demands of organizational life or interpersonal conflict that is a defining feature of the modern workplace. Rather than seeking to eliminate all malicious impulses, EI training might begin from the premise that it is important to recognize and probe inappropriate urges and dispositions. They provide clues to problems of fit between habitus and environment, and thus which aspects of habitus might be restructured (Emirbayer & Goldberg, 2005) through training programs (e.g., those based on racial prejudice), and which might be monitored and tolerated (e.g., those based on merit), but not permitted to become manifest.

Limitations and Directions for Future Research

Many of the empirical limitations of this study have already been noted. As we have emphasized, our empirical analyses were meant to be partially exploratory, providing a reference to orient the development of theory about workplace impulses, and about maliciousness. The following empirical limitations in particular must be acknowledged.

First, empirical limitations include the cross-sectional nature of the data, which make the evaluation of reverse and reciprocal causality untenable. Although it is possible that maliciousness influences selection into supervisory position, this seems highly unlikely given our results. An inability to sort out causal flow would be a more important limitation if the results had supported Hypotheses 2 or 3 (i.e., if controls for job stress or anger about work had reduced the association between supervisory level and maliciousness). If this had been the case, then there would have been uncertainty about whether anger and stress mediate supervisory-level effects, or are consequences of them. Since controlling for those variables, and others, did not reduce the contrast in estimated maliciousness between middle-level supervisors and non-supervisory workers, we feel confident that those factors do not mediate the supervisory-level effect.

That maliciousness is assessed by a single question is a second limitation. This precludes assessment of the inter-item reliability of the dependent variable. However, interpretability of the results in relation to previous research and theory that has linked hierarchical position with workplace anger (e.g., Collett & Lizardo, 2010), workplace conflict (Medina et al., 2008), and perceived victimization (Aquino, 2000) should also be considered as bolstering the veracity of our findings.

A third limitation is that some variables that are central to our argument were not assessed. In particular, the lack of information on aggressive behavior limits our ability to locate maliciousness more clearly between emotion (i.e., anger) and aggression. Some researchers have argued that there is a universal predisposition to respond to provocative actions from others with anger and aggression, and indeed, research has illustrated strong links between trait anger and workplace aggression (Douglas & Martinko, 2001; Hershcovis et al., 2007; Skarlicki, Folger, & Tesluk, 1999). We argue that it is important to attend to malicious impulses because when anger is absent or suppressed, the malicious impulse may provide the only clue to impending aggressive action. Thus, it might be useful for future studies in this area to more extensively assess impulses with more nuanced measures.

Despite its limitations, this study makes a substantial contribution to the literature on maliciousness. Our data were drawn from a general population sample, giving prudence to the generalizability of our results, and provide a good basis upon which future studies could expand. More importantly, the theoretical connections presented above provide guidance for further investigation, and point to the moral implications of structured impulses. We elaborated on ethical issues because there is a need for more research on the ethical reasoning that accompanies the malicious impulses of supervisors, and other workers. This chapter should also promote greater attention to effects of structural position on the interplay of emotions and impulses with moral reasoning. Further development of the Bourdieusian framework that we have laid the foundation for here may help guide future efforts in that direction.

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CHAPTER 11

SUPERVISORY LEVEL AND THE IMPULSE TO HARM A COWORKER: ADVANCING A BOURDIEUSIAN PERSPECTIVE

ABSTRACT

THE NOTION OF IMPULSE AND SELF-CONTROL IN THE WORKPLACE