Organizational retaliatory behavior is a form of workplace deviance. ORB is defined in the bottom up sense as an employee's reacting against a perceived injustice from their employer. ORB is also a top down issue occurring when an employee speaks out or acts in an unfavorable way against the employer. The International Journal of Conflict Management divides ORB into four different conceptual indicators: rule breaking, level or work behavior, affective commitment, and turnover intention. All of these are forms of workplace deviance.
ORB is the result of perceived injustices in the workplace, and can be categorised into the three following groups:
Interactional justice: An employee's evaluation of the perceived fairness of interpersonal treatment from superiors, and includes an organization's leaders treating employees with respect, dignity, sensitivity and sincerity.
Procedural justice: An employee's evaluation of the perceived fairness of rules and processes used by the organization to distribute outcomes to all employees within the organization.
Distributive justice: An employee's perception of the fairness of his or her own outcomes, such as pay.
Employees who feel they are being treated fairly are more likely to be loyal to their companies, have higher morale and increased helping behaviors. Employees who feel they are being treated unfairly tend to have lower morale, higher turnover rates and are more likely to exhibit ORB and another forms of workplace deviance including theft and/or sabotage in attempts to get even with their wrongdoer.
Against whistleblowers
The main reason for top down ORB is whistleblowing. Whilst employees will act out against the organization, employers will act out against the whistleblower by excluding them from meetings, eliminate their perquisites, assigning less desirable work or heavier work load, harsh criticism, and in certain cases, pressure to drop their lawsuit altogether. These are all forms of punishment meant to encourage employee silence and to discourage future whistle blowing. Employers typically will not waste resources retaliating against employees that are young, inexperienced and have no public credibility. Retaliation often occurs against employees with credibility in their field that have stated their claims against the organization publicly.
The test of whether workplace retaliation has occurred is whether the action would deter a reasonable person in the situation of the employee from making a complaint. The "situation" of the employee includes the granular circumstances of the employee and their particular job, such as child care and scheduling issues. Witnesses and persons who cooperate with investigations of discrimination may also be protected. Section 704 of Title VII, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-3:
Legal issues
Statistics are showing an increase in retaliatory-based lawsuits, nearly doubling since 1992 according to Zink and Gutman. This is believed to be because employers are beginning to understand the full financial costs of employee retaliatory behaviors. Another theory as to why lawsuits are increasing is employees are reporting cases of top down retaliation more due to an increased understanding of employee rights. Retaliation claims are standardized by the adverse employment clause, defining "any action that materially changes the terms, conditions, and privileges or employment" as retaliation. Validity of retaliation lawsuits are also based on the "reasonable person deterrence" standard from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's compliance manual. Deterring actions include: threats, reprimands, negative performance evaluations, and harassment, suspending or limiting access to an internal grievance, giving and unjustified negative job reference, refusing to provide a job reference, informing an individual's prospective employer about the individual's protected activity, and putting an employee under surveillance.
Notable court cases
Robinson v. Shell Oil Co. Actions designed to interfere with former employee's prospective employment
Winarto v. Toshiba American Electronics Components, Inc. "Birtch continued to harass Winarto verbally, and he also undertook a disturbing physical form of harassment: kicking. Winarto testified that Birtch kicked her at work “many, many times.” lay off based on poor performance appraisals made after complaints of harassment.
EEOC vs. Navy Fed. Credit Union Increased employee surveillance, "The scheme was two-fold: to give Simms favorable performance evaluations, which could be used to defend Navy Federal’s actions in subsequent litigation; and to heighten scrutiny of Simms’s activity in order to discover an objective and seemingly legitimate basis for her termination."
Scholars Folger and Skarlicki have argued “retaliation may serve the interests of organization members and the organization itself in that employee mistreatment may be prevented by moral watchdogs, whose actual or potential retaliation serves to keep abusive managers in check”. Also, there is the case of justice itself. Studies show that there are employees who engage in this behavior, thinking that they are doing justice - that their acts whether destructive or revenge-seeking are undertaken "to restore justice." While retaliatory behavior causes destruction and damage to organizations, it could also create benefits such as the institution of positive changes in the workplace, especially in instances when opportunities were closed off. This is reinforced by prior literature that explains how ORB tend to be lowest when procedures and interactions within an organization are perceived to be fair. Organizations could also gain insights from this issue, particularly when evaluating employee perception of justice and ethics for the purpose of developing an effective template for ethical behavior and organizational justice both on the organizational and employee levels.
