Erin Frey

When organizational members violate important organizational standards, they may face termination, or they may instead be retained by the organization and given a second chance. Retained transgressors experience the tension of liminality: they maintain their affiliation to the organization, making them structural insiders, but they have committed a transgression, making them moral outsiders. How might transgressors attempt to reintegrate and feel like full organizational insiders once again? And what makes transgressors feel more or less reintegrated? Previous work has studied reintegration from victims’ or observers’ perspectives, but little is known about transgressor reintegration. To build theory on transgressor reintegration, I studied transgressors at a military service academy. Through waves of qualitative data collection and inductive analyses, I find that transgressions threaten transgressors’ integration, leading transgressors to feel precarious in their perceptions of membership and their feelings of belonging. Transgressors attempt to restore both elements, but use distinct approaches for each. Because belonging restoration requires positive interactions with many organizational actors, transgressors can – and in my data, frequently do – experience restoration of membership but not belonging. Therefore it may be relatively rare for transgressors to feel highly reintegrated following transgressions, even in organizations that devote considerable resources to reintegration.

When employees commit transgressions, organizations often use tools of organizational control to prevent them from transgressing again. We investigate whether organizations can use transgression transparency to rehabilitate transgressors. Although making transgressions transparent—which may result in stigmatization or public shaming—is generally assumed to be purely punitive, we show when and how it can foster rehabilitation. We draw on a longitudinal, qualitative dataset of 23 similarly situated transgressors at a military academy that added transparency to traditional punishment by requiring transgressors to wear a pin that signaled their transgression. Data from transgressors and from other organizational members revealed that instead of prompting persistent stigmatization, social awareness of the transgression prompted others’ inquiry, gradually engaging transgressors in a coactive process to develop a mutually acceptable narrative of their transgression through a mechanism we call personal narrative control. For that personal narrative to endure, transgressors needed to exercise self-control and avoid further transgressions, as they did in our study even after the pin was removed, signaling rehabilitation. We induce four contextual conditions for transgression transparency to trigger personal narrative control and theorize how they might generalize to other organizations seeking to rehabilitate transgressors.

Though organizational scholars have studied punishment for decades, recent examples of punishment in organizations cannot be fully explained by the scholarly literature. This may be

because much of our prior understanding of punishment has been based on studies in highly

bounded organizations, but with the shift to remote work arrangements and contract or freelance

work, modern organizations are becoming increasingly boundaryless. Does punishment in

bounded organizations look different than punishment in boundaryless organizations? To

answer this question, we review and categorize the literature on punishment in organizations

according to the boundedness of the organization it examined. We find that though there are similarities in punishment in bounded and boundaryless organizations, punishment in boundaryless

organizations involves different actors, punishing different situations, for different reasons, using

different methods. However, many questions about punishment in boundaryless organizations

remain, including about the pervasiveness, motivations, and impacts that punishment has in

boundaryless organizations.

Although income is an important predictor of life satisfaction, the precise forces that drive this relationship remain unclear. We

propose that financial resources afford individuals a path to reducing the distressing impact of everyday hassles, thereby increasing one’s life satisfaction. More specifically, we hypothesize that financial scarcity is associated with greater distress intensity in

everyday life. Furthermore, we propose that lower perceived control helps explain why financial scarcity predicts higher distress

intensity and lower life satisfaction. We provide evidence for these hypotheses in a 30-day daily diary study (522 participants,

13,733 observations). A second study (N = 376) further suggests that, although everyone relies on social support to ease stress,

financial scarcity shrinks the sense one can use economic resources to reduce the adverse impact of daily hassles. Although

money may not necessarily buy happiness, it reduces the intensity of stressors experienced in daily life—and thereby increases

life satisfaction.

Employee misbehavior can be defined as transgressions that go beyond unintentional mistakes but do not rise to the level of criminal offenses. Managers are often given substantial discretion over how to handle such behavior, but they may be unsure about what their response should be or unaware of the extent to which others will care about their response. We offer a framework to help managers respond to misbehavior, particularly when firing the offender is not an option. We identify types of formal and informal responses that not only deter future offenses but also help to restore perceptions of justice within the organization. We also provide guidance on how managers should select and communicate these responses to other employees. Finally, we highlight two supplementary actions that managers can consider to restore perceptions of justice: victim restitution (that is, providing compensation to or otherwise helping to assuage the distress of the wronged party) and offender reintegration (that is, helping the wrongdoer get back to work within the organization).