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Gaslighting in Organizations: Theoretical Foundations and Empirical Explorations

2025· article· en· W4416003051 on OpenAlexaffabout
Xin Meng, Samantha Stalion, Rebecca L. Greenbaum, Paula A. Kincaid, Jonathan Hendricks, Brett H. Neely, Troy A. Smith, Mohammad Khalilinejad, Stefan T. Mol, Laura Tognetti, Marijana Matijaš

Bibliographic record

VenueAcademy of Management Proceedings · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicConflict Management and Negotiation
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Calgary
Fundersnot available
KeywordsOrganizational studiesConversationFoundation (evidence)Perspective (graphical)Organizational behaviorPresentation (obstetrics)PerceptionOrganizational learningOrganizational theory

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Gaslighting–a form of psychological and emotional manipulation in which a perpetrator seeks to make a target doubt the validity of their perceptions or feelings–has recently garnered increased interest from the public and academia. Despite its profound implications, gaslighting remains understudied in organizational contexts. To respond to the call for a more comprehensive understanding of gaslighting in organizational settings, this symposium aims to theoretically ground gaslighting in organizations and discuss early explorations of gaslighting at work to lay the foundation for more organizational scholars to conduct relevant studies in this area. Specifically, we include three theory papers to conceptualize and delineate gaslighting in organizational settings with different emphases. The first presentation theorizes possible antecedents, outcomes, and key mechanisms for gaslighting at work. The second takes a more specific angle by integrating different theories to illustrate the gaslighting process within leader-member dyads. The third also addresses gaslighting in leader-member settings by focusing on leader-member characteristics and the toxic organizational cultures these gaslighting relationships breed. The fourth extends beyond theorizing to examine how supervisors and coworkers apply different gaslighting tactics to abuse others, while the last paper leverages an organizational perspective in the exploration of policy gaslighting. Together, these papers seek to spark a meaningful conversation among scholars and practitioners to advance our understanding of gaslighting in organizational contexts, thereby inspiring future research on this important topic. Theorizing on the Critical Antecedents and Consequences of Gaslighting in Organizations. Author: Paula Ann Kincaid; The University of Texas at Tyler All in your head? A review and framework for managerial gaslighting Author: Jonathan Hendricks; University of Nebraska-Lincoln Author: Brett H Neely; Author: Troy A. Smith; University of Oklahoma Author: XIN MENG; Rutgers University Toxic Leaders at Work: Towards a Novel NARC-Attachment Theory of Workplace Gaslighting Author: Samantha Stalion; University of North Carolina at Greensboro Differentiating between Formal and Informal Sources of Power Wielded by Perpetrators of Gaslighting Author: Mohammad Khalilinejad; University of Calgary Author: Babatunde (Tunde) Ogunfowora; University of Calgary Author: Addison Maerz; Author: Simon Lloyd D. Restubog; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ChatGPT Assisted Development and Construct Validation of the Scale for Policy Gaslighting Author: Stefan Thomas Mol; University of Amsterdam Author: Marijana Matijaš; Author: Laura Tognetti; -

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.667
Threshold uncertainty score0.303

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.028
GPT teacher head0.364
Teacher spread0.335 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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