Social Conduct Toward Organizations

Groups play a crucial role in everyday life and as a result are the target of individuals' sense-making processes and antisocial and prosocial conduct. Recent research has focused on causal attributions as an underlying social cognitive mechanism in perceivers' explanations of groups. Once in mind, however, little is understood about how these causal explanations influence a perceiver's social conduct toward groups following negative group events. We conducted three studies to test predictions derived from social conduct theory and previous research concerning perceivers' social cognition toward a specific group, namely, organizations. In Study 1, we examined the effect of locus and controllable attributions on a perceiver's social conduct toward an organization. Responding to critical incidents stimuli, in Study 2, workers recalled a personal negative event involving the organization they worked for to examine the interrelation among responsibility judgments, anger and sympathy, and antisocial and prosocial conduct. We conducted Study 3 to replicate and extend the findings of Study 2 by exploring a different type of group and perceiver. By and large, the findings confirmed hypotheses, which predicted that an individual perceiver's social conduct toward groups would be differentially affected by causal attributions, judgments of responsibility, and feelings of anger or sympathy toward the group.