Much like the terms and conditions associated with the technologies we use every day, the “terms and conditions” of employment are rarely transparent or meaningfully considered because the most consequential workplace realities are often neither clearly articulated nor fully disclosed. These hidden terms typically become visible only when individuals encounter mistreatment, exclusion, retaliation, or barriers to justice at work. My research examines how employees and organizations navigate workplace justice, conflict, and accountability, with particular attention to the informal norms, institutional processes, and power dynamics that shape workplace experiences. Bridging social and personality psychology with organizational behavior and organizational justice, my work primarily seeks to understand how organizational systems influence employees’ pursuit, restoration, and evaluation of justice.

A central contribution of my work is the development of anticipatory retaliation, a construct that captures the informal, preemptive punishment employees face for merely considering or signaling intent to report wrongdoing. This research shows how employees who attempt to pursue procedural justice are often disciplined before any formal grievance is filed, through ostracism, reputational harm, and career constraint. By reframing grievance systems as potential mechanisms of organizational control rather than solely as mechanisms of protection, this work helps explain why many individuals disengage or fail to receive justice when reporting despite clear evidence of mistreatment. 

Building on this justice-oriented framework, my research also examines how unresolved workplace mistreatment can, in rare cases, escalate into retributive retaliation, including targeted workplace violence. This work conceptualizes violence not as impulsive or senseless, but as a morally framed response to sustained interactional injustice and perceived procedural futility. Informed in part by my work as a research fellow with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, this line of research situates escalation within broader organizational and cultural norms surrounding fairness, blame, and deservedness. Together, these insights highlight how failures of organizational justice can produce consequences that extend well beyond the workplace.

Building on this work, I also examine how third-party observers make sense of workplace mistreatment and violence after it occurs. Drawing on witness interviews, archival records, public discourse, and experimental methods, this research investigates how observers retrospectively reconstruct workplace violence and evaluate the legitimacy of different justice responses. My findings suggest that perceptions of foreseeability shape procedural futility and the perceived legitimacy of retributive responses, influencing how observers interpret organizational responsibility and the broader consequences of workplace mistreatment. By integrating organizational justice with sensemaking perspectives, this work advances understanding of how individuals evaluate workplace conflict, accountability, and justice following extreme organizational events. 

Methodologically, I am a mixed-methods scholar whose work spans qualitative interviews, archival analysis, scale development, field surveys, experiments, and emerging methods such as virtual reality. I have taken an entrepreneurial approach to research design, building collaborations with nonprofit organizations, municipal agencies, and law enforcement partners, and using unconventional data sources such as Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to examine employee behavior and institutional processes that are typically difficult to observe. Across projects, my goal is to produce theoretically rigorous research that clarifies how organizational justice systems succeed or fail—and what those failures cost individuals, organizations, and communities.