Responding to the paucity of institutional literature meaningfully distinguishing between emotional displays and the experience of emotions, I describe the process by which display rules are codified into the logics governing an institutional regime. I then theorize the role of feigning behaviors—emotional displays that are decoupled from the physiological experience of emotion either in intensity or valence (positive/negative)—in the higher-order dynamics of institutional logics. Specifically, I suggest that the two categories of feigning behavior (valence congruous feigning and diametric feigning) can play different roles in catalyzing the coexistence, blending, and contestation of logics. This research aids institutional theorists in understanding the local affairs and “on-the-ground” lived experiences of logics by highlighting the role of feigned emotional display as the ubiquitous mechanism through which persons navigate and cope with institutional mandates.

With empirical research on abusive supervision flourishing, there is an increasing need for an integrative framework that accounts for how and why individuals vary in their perceptions, experiences, and responses to abuse over time. To address this need, we integrate theories of emotions to present a multiphase, episodic process model explaining how initial attributions and appraisals combine to give rise to three distinct emotions—anger, fear, and sadness—that, in turn, drive a range of behavioral responses. We build on this foundation to offer new propositions on how various person and situational factors combine at each phase to produce different emotional and behavioral pathways, and we further conceptualize how feedback loops linking the behavioral responses in one episode to the next can result in emotional modulations and increasing (or decreasing) trajectories of adaptation to abuse. We advance the abusive supervision literature by providing a dynamic framework that integrates and organizes existing research, offering new emotions-based explanations for why people exhibit a range of responses to abuse over time, and highlighting areas in need of future research that have the potential to provide a more complete understanding of abusive supervision and its implications for organizations.

Denied promotions occur when individuals go up for but do not receive promotions at work. The extant literature focuses on the negative implications of denied promotions. We argue, in contrast, that individuals can ultimately benefit from denied promotions and experience positive outcomes when they construct growth-based stories about the event. Drawing on a sensemaking perspective, we articulate when individuals are likely to construct growth-based denied promotion stories, highlighting the identity and social conditions that support such stories. We then link growth-based denied promotion stories to the positive behavioral outcomes of work engagement and career proactivity via increases in resilience in their career identities. Finally, we situate denied promotions in the broader context of the career and address how responses to denied promotions are influenced by past responses to career setbacks and may shape future responses to career setbacks. Our model provides theoretical contributions to the literature on denied promotions, careers, positive organizational scholarship, and sensemaking.

Popular press accounts and emerging research suggest that organizations increasingly face the prospect of managing employees who are highly entitled, yet relatively little research has explored entitlement in work settings. Moreover, in the limited existing research, scholars have considered entitlement through a narrow lens, primarily viewing it as a stable individual difference without consideration of the social context that surrounds the individual. The conceptualization presented here, which we label “work-situated entitlement,” depicts entitlement as a socially determined work condition that reflects a misalignment between perceptions of the individual employee and perceptions of the workgroup. Situating entitlement in the work context allows for explanation of both the processes through which work-situated entitlement develops and its emotional and behavioral effects. This model provides a broader conceptualization of entitlement and illustrates how organizations might intervene to limit its deleterious work-related consequences.