Whose Side Are You On? Exploring the Role of Perspective Taking on Third-Party’s Reactions to Workplace Deviance

ABSTRACT

We introduce perspective taking as an antecedent of third-party reactions to different forms of workplace deviance. Varying the perspective taken by third-parties, the target and the type of workplace deviance, we show that third-parties who take the perpetrator’s perspective perceive the incident as less of a moral violation, make less internal, and more external attributions for the perpetrator’s behavior, which in turn reduces endorsement of punishment. Findings were consistent across four studies, and the mediating mechanisms supported by the instrumental variable method and the concurrent double randomization design.

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Joerg Dietz for helpful comments on the previous versions of the article.

Notes

Of note, the number of excluded participants is similar to Study 1. We believe that the relatively high number of participants who did not respond correctly to the manipulation check suggests that the task of putting oneself in the place of someone else, especially when this person was acting with severe deviance, was perceived to be rather challenging.