Abstract
While organizational behavior research has examined the role of various emotions at work, contempt has been largely unexplored within a workplace context. Individuals experience the emotion of contempt when they look down upon others or appraise them as inferior to themselves (Izard, 1977), typically on dimensions of morality or competence (Fischer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016). In the current paper, we develop a conceptual model to examine both the antecedents and consequences of contempt in the workplace. We draw from the Social Comparison Model (Festinger, 1954) and Affective Events Theory (Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996) to develop 10 propositions. First, we propose that contempt will be elicited in organizations when a drive for social comparison combined with the presence of individual differences lead workers to appraise their coworkers as inferior. We then propose that workers who feel contempt will engage in disparaging behavior toward their coworkers, allowing them to boost their own self-esteem, but yet dam...
Published Version
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