abstractWe examine the relationship between HRM practices, conceptualized at the workplace level, and individual employee attitudes and behaviour. We focus on two possible explanations for the relationship: social exchange and job influence/employee discretion. Findings from a study of employees in North‐East England suggest that there is a positive impact of HRM practices on organizational citizenship behaviour, through an effect on perceived job influence/discretion. There was no such effect for perceived organizational support. These findings provide support for a job influence and opportunity explanation of HRM effects on employee attitudes and behaviour.

We investigated how supervisors' interpretations of what motivates their subordinates' feedback-seeking behavior were related to both the quality of leader-member exchange and subordinates' work performance. Using a sample of 499 supervisor-subordinate dyads collected in China in two studies, we found that subordinates' feedback seeking was positively related to the quality of leader-member exchange and objective work performance only when supervisors interpreted the feedback-seeking behavior as being driven more by performance enhancement motives and less by impression management motives.

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.