The Consequences of Failing to Act: Examining the Importance of Perceived Employee-Directed Managerial Inaction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With increasing momentum to hold managers accountable for their failure to act in response to aversive employee experiences, it is critical to develop a conceptual and theoretical understanding of this phenomenon. We introduce perceived employee-directed managerial inaction to capture employees’ perceptions that their manager failed to act in response to an aversive event that they experienced despite a perceived duty or obligation for the manager to do so. Drawing on the fundamental social dilemma, we propose that perceived employee-directed managerial inaction is negatively associated with employees’ perceptions that their manager is trustworthy, which can prompt detrimental outcomes for managers (withdrawal of manager-directed citizenship behavior, resistance behavior, and negative gossip about the manager) as well as for employees (lower psychological well-being). To investigate what perceived employee-directed managerial inaction is as well as why and how it can impact managers and employees, we develop a conceptualization of this construct, validate a measure, and test our theoretical model using an experiment and two multi-wave surveys. Contributions include answering calls to consider the importance of inactive and undesirable event-based responses, conceptually defining perceived employee-directed managerial inaction, and providing a validated measure to stimulate empirical research for this theoretically and practically important phenomenon. We also showcase why and how perceived employee-directed managerial inaction can have negative implications, including how this can inform employees’ generalized perceptions of managers. Overall, we highlight the importance of recognizing that perceived employee-directed managerial inaction is not benign but rather an undesirable response that can negatively impact managers and employees.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".