Victim precipitation is embedded deeply within industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology. Cortina, Rabelo, and Holland (Reference Cortina, Rabelo and Holland2018) are right to challenge the assumptions that have perpetuated victim blaming in our discipline (consciously and unconsciously); however, a significant source of victim precipitation discourse within our field was strikingly absent in their discussion: construct measurement. The nature of how we measure most of our workplace aggression and mistreatment constructs (e.g., incivility, abusive supervision, bullying) have potential to negate the experiences of targeted employees as well as the unique impact of various perpetrator behaviors. Furthermore, how we interpret these measures can result in researchers and practitioners privileging the experiences of some individuals and dismissing the experiences of others. How can we hope to achieve a progressive approach to mistreatment in our disciplines if our measures do not keep pace?
As we strive to develop more progressive measures of workplace mistreatment that center the experiences of targets and victims of aggression, it is imperative that, in doing so, I-O psychology allows the individual the ability to communicate his or her experiences, feelings, and thoughts on the event(s). In an effort to be more “objective,” our measures have removed the opportunity for us to capture the variability of how individuals perceive aggressive workplace situations, and in losing this, we make assumptions about how individuals will feel after a situation instead of enabling them to communicate their feelings.
We explore these topics in greater detail and provide recommendations on ways in which we can center the experiences of targets in order to foster a more progressive approach to workplace mistreatment.
Measurement of Mistreatment
The way workplace aggression is typically measured in I-O psychology is to ask participants the frequency with which they have experienced a list of behaviors related to workplace mistreatment. In this commentary we use Tepper's (Reference Tepper2000) abusive supervision measure as an example; however, this critique is generalizable across many workplace mistreatment constructs and literatures. Within the abusive supervision measure, there are 15 items related to experienced behaviors, such as being ridiculed, isolated, blamed, and made to feel stupid or insignificant (among others). For each item, the frequency of experiencing these behaviors is noted and an overall score is tabulated. There are several issues with this form of measurement.
First, we should consider that these lists are not exhaustive of aggressive behaviors in work contexts: Just because an individual does not report experiencing behaviors explicitly included in the measures we use, it does not mean that they do not identify as victims of mistreatment or aggression. By relying heavily on behavior-based measures, we may miss aggression that is occurring and harming individuals in our workplaces, thus diminishing the visibility and acknowledgment of victimization toward some employees or groups. For example, behaviors targeted toward minority employees may not be captured in the most popular mistreatment measures (e.g., repeatedly using an Anglicized version of an employee's birth name even though the employee has explicitly communicated the proper pronunciation; misgendering a trans employee). Therefore, by moving away from, or at least supplementing, our behavioral measures of workplace mistreatment with measures that enable subjective communication of victimization, we will be able to demonstrate greater inclusivity in understanding victim identification.
Another concern with our current measurement of workplace mistreatment is that employees who experience the behaviors listed in the measures may not perceive themselves to be victimized. Aquino and Thau (Reference Aquino and Thau2009) discuss that, for a target of aggression to self-identify as a victim, they must be unable to achieve essential psychological and physiological needs. Researchers (and some practitioners) assess behavioral measures and make assumptions to label people as victims without creating space for self-determination of identification. Therefore, the term victim is not necessarily synonymous with the label target in this situation. Perpetrators may make someone a target of a specific aggressive behavior, but the individual may not experience any physical or psychological harm (therefore, not identify as a victim). For example, one item in Tepper's (Reference Tepper2000) abusive supervision measure is, “My boss invades my privacy.” Within the same organization a manager may occasionally go through the computer files of two employees when they are not around (according to the measure, both employees have had their privacy invaded). One employee may overlook this behavior as a minor inconvenience, whereas another may be extremely threatened by this act due to sensitive information on the employee's computer, such as an HR complaint he or she was writing about this manager. Although both employees would rate the same behavior and frequency, the impact on employees regarding their experience of victimization is different.
In addition to the assumption of a certain behavior having uniform impact on individuals, our current measures also presume that greater frequency of aggression is equivalent to greater impact. However, there are a myriad of factors that can contribute to the impact of aggressive behavior on victimization. As Hershcovis (Reference Hershcovis2011) noted, the power distance between perpetrator and target, the perceived intent of the perpetrator, the intensity and frequency of the behavior, and the visibility of the behavior to others all factor into the context experienced by the target as moderators of the relationship between the aggressive behavior and the mediating mechanisms of perceived injustice, affect, and attribution of blame. If we take the idea of frequency of aggression as a boundary condition, this approach negates the individual’s subjective interpretation of how these behaviors make them feel. Using the example above, if a manager invades the privacy once of someone who finds the experience of great personal risk or harm, he or she is likely to feel more like a victim than someone who has his or her privacy invaded multiple times but has nothing at risk. Without assessing the contextual factors of the experiences of aggression, and instead using frequency as a proxy measure for personal impact, we misunderstand the nature of the aggression and how individuals are experiencing victimization.
Furthermore, an overreliance on frequency as a component of workplace aggression without contextualizing the work environment risks missing out on organizational and group norms. For example, high frequency of behavior from most individuals in the context indicates that the behavior is somehow accepted as “normal behavior.” This could foster the idea of a work climate in which the behavior is deemed acceptable (or at least not unacceptable) to occur. Thus, we would have individuals responding to our measures indicating high frequency of certain behaviors, but they may not identify as victims from this behavior. This is not to suggest that individuals cannot identify as victimized within these environments because the culture or norms exist; instead this acknowledges that we must have more nuanced measurement in order to distinguish those who experience behavior and identify as a victim from those who experience behavior and do not identify as a victim. Frequency is an important component of workplace aggression because it provides contextual information regarding the enactment of aggression. However, focusing solely on frequency limits the full understanding of the aggressive workplace situation. A reflective measure of victimization would be better situated to distinguish this difference than our current measures.
Finally, current forms of workplace aggression measurement treat unique behaviors as equivalent by averaging them out to establish a total score on the construct. In Tepper's (Reference Tepper2000) abusive supervision measure, 15 behaviors are all considered equivalent by virtue of combining them into a total score; however, they may not have equivalent impact on individuals. Is it more impactful that an employee experienced multiple behaviors at a low frequency or a single aggressive behavior at a high frequency? Not all behaviors are created equal or have equal impact on all individuals. Because our measures do not take into account this complexity, we are left with each researcher interpreting the data differently and not necessarily how the individuals experienced the aggressive event(s).
Implications
If I-O psychology continues to measure workplace mistreatment with the above noted assumptions, then we risk perpetuating the assignment of victim status by researchers and practitioners, rather than self-identification. This is problematic in both directions:
-
• If we assign individuals the status of victim when they do not identify that way, we may be missing important psychological phenomena. Relationships between workplace aggression constructs may be stronger or weaker depending on who the individuals are that are included in the study. For instance, if we are including individuals only because they report certain behaviors targeted toward them and not because of how they interpret and attribute the behavior, then correlations between mistreatment and consequences may be attenuated.
-
• If we assume that an individual is not a victim due to our measurement, when they have internalized that experience as victimizing, we are further negating the lived experiences of these individuals and risk secondary victimization through the dismissal of their feelings.
Recommendations
We would like to further Cortina et al.’s (Reference Cortina, Rabelo and Holland2018) proposition to understand workplace mistreatment beyond blaming the victim by recommending more progressive methods to measure victimization.
As researchers and practitioners of workplace aggression, it is substantive to incorporate reflective measurement to the current formative measures of workplace mistreatment. A combined approach to measurement would help us understand both the behaviors occurring (i.e., formative measurement) and the lived experience of individuals (i.e., reflective measurement). For example, a reflective victimization measure (e.g., Sasso and González-Morales, Reference Sasso and González-Morales2014) is stripped from the limitations that other aggression measures include in their statements (i.e., abusive supervision involves power distance by definition; bullying involves high frequency). This way, the contextual elements of frequency, power distance, or visibility can be operationalized in separate measures that can then be analyzed as correlates of perceived victimization, and can help us understand the antecedents, consequences, and/or boundary conditions.
Moreover, if we were using the abusive supervision measure along with a reflective measure, we could analyze the supervisor's behaviors as reported by the targets and also the perceived victimization of subordinates. This would also allow us to investigate research questions such as how bystanders are affected by experiences of mistreatment. For instance, in the case of abusive supervision, it is not difficult to imagine that subordinates who are not targeted by abusive behaviors may feel hurt as bystanders of unfair and abusive supervisor treatment. This can only be studied if there are measures of victimization that allow the triangulation of the formative and reflective data from all reporting sources.
The bystander effect exemplifies how the intent of the perpetrator is less important than the impact that their behavior has on others, and how reflective measurement is needed to assess impact in a reliable and valid way. Especially in situations of privileged/power-based mistreatment, perpetrator intentions do not matter, but impact on individuals does, and this impact can only be assessed using reflective measurement that captures how harmful that experience is for the victim. Moreover, factors like organizational climate, group norms, and other organizational, cultural, and structural aspects can moderate impact.
Conclusion
To transition toward a progressive approach to workplace mistreatment and aggression within industrial and organizational psychology and to avoid victim precipitation conceptualizations, we must challenge the fundamental assumptions that structure our construct measurement. Our measures need greater flexibility for different forms of aggression, they must not be limited to frequency or specific acts, and they must center the target's perceptions of aggression and self-identification as a victim. We can do this by modernizing our approach through incorporating formative and reflective measures of mistreatment, prioritizing contextual factors of the situation, and creating opportunities for participants to self-identify as a victim or not.
Victim precipitation is embedded deeply within industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology. Cortina, Rabelo, and Holland (Reference Cortina, Rabelo and Holland2018) are right to challenge the assumptions that have perpetuated victim blaming in our discipline (consciously and unconsciously); however, a significant source of victim precipitation discourse within our field was strikingly absent in their discussion: construct measurement. The nature of how we measure most of our workplace aggression and mistreatment constructs (e.g., incivility, abusive supervision, bullying) have potential to negate the experiences of targeted employees as well as the unique impact of various perpetrator behaviors. Furthermore, how we interpret these measures can result in researchers and practitioners privileging the experiences of some individuals and dismissing the experiences of others. How can we hope to achieve a progressive approach to mistreatment in our disciplines if our measures do not keep pace?
As we strive to develop more progressive measures of workplace mistreatment that center the experiences of targets and victims of aggression, it is imperative that, in doing so, I-O psychology allows the individual the ability to communicate his or her experiences, feelings, and thoughts on the event(s). In an effort to be more “objective,” our measures have removed the opportunity for us to capture the variability of how individuals perceive aggressive workplace situations, and in losing this, we make assumptions about how individuals will feel after a situation instead of enabling them to communicate their feelings.
We explore these topics in greater detail and provide recommendations on ways in which we can center the experiences of targets in order to foster a more progressive approach to workplace mistreatment.
Measurement of Mistreatment
The way workplace aggression is typically measured in I-O psychology is to ask participants the frequency with which they have experienced a list of behaviors related to workplace mistreatment. In this commentary we use Tepper's (Reference Tepper2000) abusive supervision measure as an example; however, this critique is generalizable across many workplace mistreatment constructs and literatures. Within the abusive supervision measure, there are 15 items related to experienced behaviors, such as being ridiculed, isolated, blamed, and made to feel stupid or insignificant (among others). For each item, the frequency of experiencing these behaviors is noted and an overall score is tabulated. There are several issues with this form of measurement.
First, we should consider that these lists are not exhaustive of aggressive behaviors in work contexts: Just because an individual does not report experiencing behaviors explicitly included in the measures we use, it does not mean that they do not identify as victims of mistreatment or aggression. By relying heavily on behavior-based measures, we may miss aggression that is occurring and harming individuals in our workplaces, thus diminishing the visibility and acknowledgment of victimization toward some employees or groups. For example, behaviors targeted toward minority employees may not be captured in the most popular mistreatment measures (e.g., repeatedly using an Anglicized version of an employee's birth name even though the employee has explicitly communicated the proper pronunciation; misgendering a trans employee). Therefore, by moving away from, or at least supplementing, our behavioral measures of workplace mistreatment with measures that enable subjective communication of victimization, we will be able to demonstrate greater inclusivity in understanding victim identification.
Another concern with our current measurement of workplace mistreatment is that employees who experience the behaviors listed in the measures may not perceive themselves to be victimized. Aquino and Thau (Reference Aquino and Thau2009) discuss that, for a target of aggression to self-identify as a victim, they must be unable to achieve essential psychological and physiological needs. Researchers (and some practitioners) assess behavioral measures and make assumptions to label people as victims without creating space for self-determination of identification. Therefore, the term victim is not necessarily synonymous with the label target in this situation. Perpetrators may make someone a target of a specific aggressive behavior, but the individual may not experience any physical or psychological harm (therefore, not identify as a victim). For example, one item in Tepper's (Reference Tepper2000) abusive supervision measure is, “My boss invades my privacy.” Within the same organization a manager may occasionally go through the computer files of two employees when they are not around (according to the measure, both employees have had their privacy invaded). One employee may overlook this behavior as a minor inconvenience, whereas another may be extremely threatened by this act due to sensitive information on the employee's computer, such as an HR complaint he or she was writing about this manager. Although both employees would rate the same behavior and frequency, the impact on employees regarding their experience of victimization is different.
In addition to the assumption of a certain behavior having uniform impact on individuals, our current measures also presume that greater frequency of aggression is equivalent to greater impact. However, there are a myriad of factors that can contribute to the impact of aggressive behavior on victimization. As Hershcovis (Reference Hershcovis2011) noted, the power distance between perpetrator and target, the perceived intent of the perpetrator, the intensity and frequency of the behavior, and the visibility of the behavior to others all factor into the context experienced by the target as moderators of the relationship between the aggressive behavior and the mediating mechanisms of perceived injustice, affect, and attribution of blame. If we take the idea of frequency of aggression as a boundary condition, this approach negates the individual’s subjective interpretation of how these behaviors make them feel. Using the example above, if a manager invades the privacy once of someone who finds the experience of great personal risk or harm, he or she is likely to feel more like a victim than someone who has his or her privacy invaded multiple times but has nothing at risk. Without assessing the contextual factors of the experiences of aggression, and instead using frequency as a proxy measure for personal impact, we misunderstand the nature of the aggression and how individuals are experiencing victimization.
Furthermore, an overreliance on frequency as a component of workplace aggression without contextualizing the work environment risks missing out on organizational and group norms. For example, high frequency of behavior from most individuals in the context indicates that the behavior is somehow accepted as “normal behavior.” This could foster the idea of a work climate in which the behavior is deemed acceptable (or at least not unacceptable) to occur. Thus, we would have individuals responding to our measures indicating high frequency of certain behaviors, but they may not identify as victims from this behavior. This is not to suggest that individuals cannot identify as victimized within these environments because the culture or norms exist; instead this acknowledges that we must have more nuanced measurement in order to distinguish those who experience behavior and identify as a victim from those who experience behavior and do not identify as a victim. Frequency is an important component of workplace aggression because it provides contextual information regarding the enactment of aggression. However, focusing solely on frequency limits the full understanding of the aggressive workplace situation. A reflective measure of victimization would be better situated to distinguish this difference than our current measures.
Finally, current forms of workplace aggression measurement treat unique behaviors as equivalent by averaging them out to establish a total score on the construct. In Tepper's (Reference Tepper2000) abusive supervision measure, 15 behaviors are all considered equivalent by virtue of combining them into a total score; however, they may not have equivalent impact on individuals. Is it more impactful that an employee experienced multiple behaviors at a low frequency or a single aggressive behavior at a high frequency? Not all behaviors are created equal or have equal impact on all individuals. Because our measures do not take into account this complexity, we are left with each researcher interpreting the data differently and not necessarily how the individuals experienced the aggressive event(s).
Implications
If I-O psychology continues to measure workplace mistreatment with the above noted assumptions, then we risk perpetuating the assignment of victim status by researchers and practitioners, rather than self-identification. This is problematic in both directions:
• If we assign individuals the status of victim when they do not identify that way, we may be missing important psychological phenomena. Relationships between workplace aggression constructs may be stronger or weaker depending on who the individuals are that are included in the study. For instance, if we are including individuals only because they report certain behaviors targeted toward them and not because of how they interpret and attribute the behavior, then correlations between mistreatment and consequences may be attenuated.
• If we assume that an individual is not a victim due to our measurement, when they have internalized that experience as victimizing, we are further negating the lived experiences of these individuals and risk secondary victimization through the dismissal of their feelings.
Recommendations
We would like to further Cortina et al.’s (Reference Cortina, Rabelo and Holland2018) proposition to understand workplace mistreatment beyond blaming the victim by recommending more progressive methods to measure victimization.
As researchers and practitioners of workplace aggression, it is substantive to incorporate reflective measurement to the current formative measures of workplace mistreatment. A combined approach to measurement would help us understand both the behaviors occurring (i.e., formative measurement) and the lived experience of individuals (i.e., reflective measurement). For example, a reflective victimization measure (e.g., Sasso and González-Morales, Reference Sasso and González-Morales2014) is stripped from the limitations that other aggression measures include in their statements (i.e., abusive supervision involves power distance by definition; bullying involves high frequency). This way, the contextual elements of frequency, power distance, or visibility can be operationalized in separate measures that can then be analyzed as correlates of perceived victimization, and can help us understand the antecedents, consequences, and/or boundary conditions.
Moreover, if we were using the abusive supervision measure along with a reflective measure, we could analyze the supervisor's behaviors as reported by the targets and also the perceived victimization of subordinates. This would also allow us to investigate research questions such as how bystanders are affected by experiences of mistreatment. For instance, in the case of abusive supervision, it is not difficult to imagine that subordinates who are not targeted by abusive behaviors may feel hurt as bystanders of unfair and abusive supervisor treatment. This can only be studied if there are measures of victimization that allow the triangulation of the formative and reflective data from all reporting sources.
The bystander effect exemplifies how the intent of the perpetrator is less important than the impact that their behavior has on others, and how reflective measurement is needed to assess impact in a reliable and valid way. Especially in situations of privileged/power-based mistreatment, perpetrator intentions do not matter, but impact on individuals does, and this impact can only be assessed using reflective measurement that captures how harmful that experience is for the victim. Moreover, factors like organizational climate, group norms, and other organizational, cultural, and structural aspects can moderate impact.
Conclusion
To transition toward a progressive approach to workplace mistreatment and aggression within industrial and organizational psychology and to avoid victim precipitation conceptualizations, we must challenge the fundamental assumptions that structure our construct measurement. Our measures need greater flexibility for different forms of aggression, they must not be limited to frequency or specific acts, and they must center the target's perceptions of aggression and self-identification as a victim. We can do this by modernizing our approach through incorporating formative and reflective measures of mistreatment, prioritizing contextual factors of the situation, and creating opportunities for participants to self-identify as a victim or not.