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Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite Your Face: A Justice Perspective on Damaging an Alma Mater's Reputational Ranking
Author(s) -
Cable Daniel M.,
Parsons Charles K.
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2001.tb02482.x
Subject(s) - organizational justice , economic justice , distributive justice , reputation , face (sociological concept) , psychology , perception , procedural justice , perspective (graphical) , quality (philosophy) , social psychology , ranking (information retrieval) , sociology , law , political science , epistemology , social science , organizational commitment , philosophy , neuroscience , artificial intelligence , machine learning , computer science
Although economic self‐interest and self‐enhancement theory predict that graduates will maximize their alma maters' reputational rankings, anecdotal evidence indicates that some graduates denigrate their alma maters' reputations when surveyed by the external media. Using organizational justice theories to motivate our hypotheses, we conducted a longitudinal investigation of 161 graduates from one university and predicted their intentions to badmouth their school to the external media. Results suggest that, controlling for perceptions of school quality, graduates used badmouthing to “punish” their alma maters when they perceived the fairness of job‐search processes and outcomes to be low. Moreover, the relationship between justice and badmouthing was interactive, such that procedural justice mattered most when distributive justice was low, highlighting the role of career offices in universities' reputational rankings.