Shooting for Fairness is Always Beneficial? Why and When Promotion Failure Affects Work Engagement

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Promotion, a part of the organization incentive and reward systems, drives employees to perform well and commit a lot to organizations. But we still know very little about the “promotion outcome—work state” relationship and its underlying mechanisms. Integrating resource-based perspective and attribution theory, we propose and test how and when promotion failure has detrimental effects on employee work engagement through cognitive and emotional resources mechanisms. Besides, we also examine the boundary role of overall promotion fairness perception. On the basis of three-wave data, our results indicate: (1) promotion failure is negatively related to employee work engagement through reduced self-efficacy and decreased positive affect; (2) the overall perception of promotion fairness strengthen the negative effect of promotion failure on employee cognitive and emotional resources (i.e., self-efficacy and positive affect) and work engagement. This research shifts our attention to the resource perspective to clarify the cognitive and emotional resource processes that relate promotion failure to employee work engagement, supports the potential dark side of the promotion fairness perception in explaining the impact of promotion failure, and provides practical advice for organizations and managers to effectively communicate the promotion outcome to promotion winners and losers.