The “Evil Pleasure”: Abusive Supervision and Third-Party Observers’ Malicious Reactions Toward Victims
研究辱虐管理如何影响第三方观察者对受害者的恶意反应，发现当观察者与受害者竞争激烈时会产生幸灾乐祸，进而导致人际破坏行为，而团队合作目标能减弱这种反应。
We investigated how abusive supervision influences interactions between third-party observers and abused victims and hypothesized when and why third parties react maliciously toward victims of abusive supervision. Drawing on the theory of rivalry, we predicted that third-party observers would experience an “evil pleasure” (schadenfreude) when they perceive a high level of rivalry with the victims of abusive supervision and that the experienced schadenfreude then would motivate third parties to engage in interpersonal destructive behaviors (i.e., undermining, incivility, and interpersonal deviance) toward the victims. We further proposed that such malicious reactions would be attenuated if groups have a high level of cooperative goals. Results based on one experimental study and two time-lagged field studies lend support to our propositions.