Angry at Your Organization? Unraveling the Role of Anxiety and Moral Obligation in the Justice and Incivility Relationship

Abstract

COVID-19 was an unprecedented shock to the world, disrupting the routines and daily lives of millions of people worldwide. Organizations have invested many resources to manage the pandemic with the dual goals of ensuring business continuity and protecting the health and lives of employees. However, not all organizational decisions may have been perceived as fair. Building upon the literature on workplace justice, we propose and test a model within the stressor-emotion framework of counterproductive work behaviors. In trying to better understand why and when incivility arises at work, we examine the indirect effect of employees’ overall justice perceptions regarding the treatment they receive from the organization on the incivility these employees show toward others, via a discrete emotion, anger toward the organization. We further consider two individual characteristics, employee’s coronavirus anxiety and employee’s moral obligation, as potential boundary conditions. Using a three-wave design, we observed that overall justice is negatively related to anger toward the organization, and in turn, to incivility behaviors. Furthermore, the association between overall justice perceptions and anger is heightened by higher levels of coronavirus anxiety, while the association between anger and incivility becomes weaker in the presence of higher levels of moral obligation.