Events

Ms. Seoin Yoon
Ph.D. Candidate in Management & Organization
Mays Business School
Texas A&M University

Since its inception by Ferris and colleagues in 2008, workplace ostracism has emerged as a solid research area, with at least six reviews documenting its ubiquity and seriousness. The consensus in this vast literature is that leaders are “domineering perpetrators” who ostracize employees. However, recent evidence suggests that leaders may be ostracized by their own employees. Despite the potential implications of workplace ostracism for leaders, we know very little about whether leaders are indeed ostracized, and if so, how those ostracized leaders feel and manage these experiences. The lack of attention paid to ostracized leaders implies that it is unlikely to develop new theory on ostracism by simply reversing the lens. Yet, there are reasons to disagree. The purpose of this dissertation is to advance ostracism literature by developing a leader-centric model that elucidates consequences, mechanisms, and boundary condition of leader experience of workplace ostracism. Drawing from a dual-motive perspective, I theorize a dual-path model wherein leader experience of workplace ostracism threatens two important goals of leaders—getting along and getting ahead—and thus leads to its downstream consequences. Specifically, I theorize that leader experience of ostracism represents belongingness threat and status threat, each of which in turn prompts divergent behavioral efforts to manage the threats (i.e., self-sacrificial behavior, abusive supervision, feedback giving). I further explore the moderating role of leader gender by developing competing hypotheses for how being ostracized may yield differential effects on male vs. female leaders. This model will be tested via a critical incident study and a within-individual examination.