Welcome to the 22nd WCP Congress Program Scheduling

Abstract Body

The high prevalence of embitterment in the work population has been supported in recent studies. In line with the just-world hypothesis (Lerner, 1980), the feeling of embitterment is seen as the aftermath of a violation of justice beliefs (Beck et al., 1979). Indeed, using Colquitt’s (2001) approach to organisational justice, Michailidis and Cropley (2017, 2018) showed that perceptions of organisational injustice elicit embitterment in employees resulting in unfavorable outcomes such as the inability to recover from job demands during off-job time. A review of recent findings on the antecedents and consequences of the feeling of embitterment in the work context will be presented and discussed. Although embitterment has been initially defined as a prolonged emotional situation, it may be argued that embitterment might fluctuate within the same employee from one day to another. This might be due to an employee, for example, experiencing more intense injustice on certain days compared to other days. As such, findings from a diary study that aimed to test embitterment as a state that may exhibit significant within-person variations will also be presented. This study expands the nomological network of embitterment by highlighting that embitterment is a state that varies within employees and by introducing the role of illegitimate tasks as a potential threat to interactional justice that may elicit feelings of embitterment with consecutive results for employees’ affective rumination during off-job hours. Practical implications will also be discussed.