Katy Decelles

• Organizational Behavior, Ph.D. University of Maryland
• Professor (Full) at University of Toronto

Online platforms are rife with racial discrimination¹, but current interventions focus on employers2,3 rather than customers. We propose a customer-facing solution: changing to a two-point rating scale (dichotomization). Compared with the ubiquitous five-star scale, we argue that dichotomization reduces modern racial discrimination by focusing eval...

We document a unique driver of consumer behavior: the public disclosure of a firm’s gender pay gap. Four experiments provide causal evidence that when firms are revealed to have gender pay gaps, consumers are less willing to pay for their goods, a reaction driven by consumer perceptions of unfairness. Unlike reactions to CEO‐to‐worker wage gaps, th...

A key assumption in past literature has been that human services workers become emotionally distant from their charges (such as clients or patients). Such distancing is said to protect workers from the emotionally draining aspects of the job but creates challenges to feeling and behaving compassionately. Because little is known about when and how c...

We theorize that anger incited by a social movement, which has a mobilizing effect among outsider activists, might immobilize collective action intentions for institutional insiders—those sympathetic to the movement and employed by its target. We conducted initial field surveys across a spectrum of social movements, including Occupy Wall Street and...

Research has documented conflicting evidence about the relationship between a leader's unpleasant affective displays and team performance. Drawing on the dual threshold model of anger, we propose a novel explanation for this paradox such that the positive relationship between leaders' unpleasant affect and team performance turns negative at high le...

Previous examinations of environmental stressors in organizations have mostly emphasized their dysfunctional effects on individuals’ emotions and behaviors. Extending this work by drawing from the social functional perspective on emotion, we propose that customers’ negative emotional responses to environmental stressors in organizations can exert b...

At AMJ, we encourage authors to produce novel, interesting, and theoretically bold work, and recommend that authors ask themselves how their manuscript challenges, changes, or advances what we know at a theoretical level before submitting their paper for review. The strength of a manuscript’s theoretical contribution is a key element that is consid...

While there is a large and ever-expanding body of work on the fields of business ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR), there is a noted absence of a single source on the methodology and research approaches to these fields. In this book, the first of its kind, leading scholars in the fields gather to analyse a range of philosophical and...

Using interviews, a laboratory experiment, and a résumé audit study, we examine racial minorities’ attempts to avoid anticipated discrimination in labor markets by concealing or downplaying racial cues in job applications, a practice known as “résumé whitening.” Interviews with racial minority university students reveal that while some minority job...

Behavioral ethics is “the social scientific study of ethical and unethical behavior in organizations” (Treviño, Weaver, and Reynolds, 2006: 952). It is a subset of business ethics research focused on describing and explaining how individuals make decisions involving issues with potential ethical implications. As behavioral ethics research has grown...

Significance We suggest that physical and situational inequality are built into people’s everyday environments—such as the modern airplane—and that exposure to these forms of inequality can trigger antisocial behavior. Analyses reveal that air rage is more common in economy class on airplanes, where inequality is physically present, and in both eco...

Using interviews, a laboratory experiment, and a résumé audit study, we examine racial minorities’ attempts to avoid anticipated discrimination in labor markets by concealing or downplaying racial cues in job applications, a practice known as “résumé whitening.” Interviews with racial minority university students reveal that while some minority job...

Research summary (123 words): We examine the variety of activist groups and their tactics in demanding firms’ social change. While extant work does not usually distinguish among activist types or their variety of tactics, we show that different activists (e.g., social movement organizations versus religious groups and activist investors) rely on di...

We examine the variety of activist groups and their tactics in demanding firms’ social change. While extant work does not usually distinguish among activist types or their variety of tactics, we show that different activists (e.g., social movement organizations versus religious groups and activist investors) rely on dissimilar tactics (e.g., boycot...

Using a mixed methods design, we examine the role of self-evaluations in influencing support for environmental issues. In Study 1—an inductive, qualitative study—we develop theory about how environmental issue supporters evaluate themselves in a mixed fashion, positively around having assets (self-assets) and negatively around questioning their per...

Although most research on cynicism toward change (CTC) has been conceptualized at the individual level, we propose that CTC is better conceptualized as a multilevel phenomenon, acting as both an employee attitude and an organizational climate. We conducted a multilevel investigation of CTC in a field sample of 687 correctional officers in the 14 pr...

Does power corrupt a moral identity, or does it enable a moral identity to emerge? Drawing from the power literature, we propose that the psychological experience of power, although often associated with promoting self-interest, is associated with greater self-interest only in the presence of a weak moral identity. Furthermore, we propose that the...

Does emotional intelligence promote behavior that strictly benefits the greater good, or can it also advance interpersonal deviance? In the investigation reported here, we tested the possibility that a core facet of emotional intelligence--emotion-regulation knowledge--can promote both prosocial and interpersonally deviant behavior. Drawing from re...

We empirically examine the reflexive or automatic aspects of moral decision making. To begin, we develop and validate a measure of an individual's implicit assumption regarding the inherent morality of business. Then, using an in-basket exercise, we demonstrate that an implicit assumption that business is inherently moral impacts day-to-day busines...

We propose a four-stage model of the organizational actions that potentially increase the speed and likelihood that an organization will restore its legitimacy with stake- holders following a transgression. Organizations that work to discover the facts of the transgression, provide an appropriate explanation of their wrongdoing, accept and serve an...