Why do some managers fail to deliver bad news fairly? Favourable self-evaluations and a lack of anxiety may be to blame

Annika Hillebrandt, PhD

Delivering bad news to employees can be a critical but daunting task. Managers often dread communicating bad news because they expect that employees may respond with anger and retaliation. However, extensive research has shown that employees are more likely to accept bad news and curtail negative reactions when managers communicate the news with dignity and respect for the recipient – that is, when they uphold interpersonal justice. Despite these benefits, managers often fail to enact interpersonal justice when delivering bad news.

To understand how interpersonal justice can be promoted, we recently examined who is less likely to deliver bad news fairly and why they may fail to do so. We conducted three studies with samples of full-time managers and employees from Canada and the United States who were employed across a variety of industries. Participants were asked to imagine that they had to communicate bad news (specifically, a layoff decision or promotion denial) to one of their subordinates. Two independent coders coded these communications for interpersonal justice by evaluating the extent to which the communicator was polite and courteous, treated the recipient with dignity and respect, and expressed concern for the recipient. Participants also completed a series of measures about their personality, appraisals, emotions, and demographics.

Consistent with our hypotheses, our findings indicated that managers are less likely to deliver bad news in an interpersonally just manner when they have high core self-evaluations – a personality trait that captures a person’s fundamental beliefs about their own worth, abilities, and control. Core self-evaluations are generally considered to be a positive personality trait that contributes to managerial effectiveness. However, managers with high core self-evaluations may be susceptible to failing to uphold interpersonal justice because they are more confident about their own coping potential (i.e., their perceived ability to manage or ameliorate a challenging situation) and are therefore less likely to experience anxiety about delivering bad news. Experiencing anxiety can be important in this context because it can propel managers to engage in behaviours that mitigate threats to their social esteem (i.e., the extent to which they are seen as fair by others) – threats that can be inherent in situations involving the delivery of bad news.

Importantly, this indicates that high core self-evaluations are not a panacea for ensuring managerial effectiveness. Instead, managers with high core self-evaluations may fail to uphold interpersonal justice because they experience less anxiety about the delivery of bad news. These findings contribute to our understanding of who is (un)likely to enact interpersonal justice in the workplace and also challenge the assumption that negative emotions are necessarily dysfunctional. Rather than reducing justice, anxiety can play a facilitative role and promote the enactment of interpersonal justice in this context.

Given that core self-evaluations were negatively associated with the enactment of interpersonal justice, it is important to consider what managers and organizations can do to overcome this effect. Fortunately, even though core self-evaluations are a stable personality trait, there are strategies that managers and organizations can employ to overcome dispositional tendencies. For example, previous research has demonstrated that the enactment of interpersonal justice when delivering bad news may be enhanced by increasing managers’ self-awareness by placing them in self-focusing situations (e.g., in front of a mirror) or by increasing their awareness that they may be disinclined to enact justice. Thus, organizations should recognize who is less likely to enact justice and consider implementing strategies to counter these effects.

Finally, it is often suggested that organizations should try to reduce managers’ negative emotions in order to promote justice in the workplace. However, our findings highlight that it is important to recognize that different negative emotions – for example, anger versus anxiety – can have disparate effects on people’s behaviour. Whereas anger has been previously found to reduce the enactment of justice, our findings suggest that anxiety may signal to managers that this is a situation where enacting interpersonal justice is important. Thus, we encourage managers to be cognizant of how their own behaviour is influenced by disparate negative emotions. This strategy may enable managers to suppress negative emotions that hinder the enactment of justice while leverage negative emotions that facilitate justice in the workplace.

This article is based on a paper published in Human Relations by Annika Hillebrandt (Ryerson University), Maria Francisca Saldanha (Universidade Católica Portuguesa), Daniel L. Brady (Wilfrid Laurier University), and Laurie J. Barclay (University of Guelph). The full article is available through open access at https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267211011000

Citation

Hillebrandt, A., Saldanha, M. F., Brady, D. L., & Barclay, L. J. (2021). Delivering bad news fairly: The influence of core self-evaluations and anxiety for the enactment of interpersonal justice. Human Relations. Advance online publication.