Shame, guilt and justice: Self-conscious emotions as mediators of the positive effects of perceived justice

Whereas organizational and justice research has explored issues related to affect, shame and guilt have been virtually ignored. Shame and guilt are self-conscious, self-evaluative emotions that occur in a social context, and have important behavioral and attitudinal implications. Finding one's self responsible for a negative performance evaluation is just such a context in which people can potentially feel shame and guilt. Negative feedback can also produce cognitive effects such as a loss of self-efficacy, and social effects such as a loss of identification with the social group. Previous research has demonstrated that when people perceive a negative outcome and its surrounding conditions to be fair and just, then these positive justice perceptions promote acceptance of the outcome and reduce negative responses. A survey of MBA alumni demonstrated that, in the context of negative performance evaluations, positive justice perceptions reduce shame, guilt, loss of self-efficacy and loss of identification. However, shame, a reflection of global self-assessment, mediates the effects of justice on self-efficacy and identification. Guilt does not demonstrate such an effect. An experimental study failed to replicate the survey mediation results, but did find that justice reduced shame in men and guilt in women. Justice also reduced externalized anger but not internalized anger. Further, as perceived justice increased, so did the interaction between internalized anger and shame; the interaction between externalized anger and shame under perceived justice expressed a u-shaped function. This research extends the organizational, justice and emotions literature by exploring the self-conscious, self-evaluative emotional responses of organizational citizens.