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 navigate workplace justice, conflict, and accountability when organizational systems fail to provide credible pathways to justice and resolution, with particular attention to the informal norms, institutional processes, and power dynamics that shape those experiences.

A central focus of my research examines how grievance systems function in practice, and the conditions under which justice-seeking itself becomes a source of professional and interpersonal risk. This research demonstrates that employees who pursue procedural justice can face preemptive, informal punishment before any formal grievance is ever filed, and that the systems designed to protect employees can operate as mechanisms of organizational control. By examining how organizational responses to perceived justice-seeking unfold across multiple stages, this work challenges assumptions about when and how grievance systems provide meaningful protection.

Building on this work, my research also examines how unresolved workplace mistreatment can, in rare cases, escalate into retributive retaliation, including targeted workplace violence. Rather than treating these events as impulsive or senseless, I conceptualize them as morally framed responses to sustained interactional injustice and perceived procedural futility. Informed in part by my work as a research fellow with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 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 evaluate organizational responsibility and the legitimacy of different justice responses following workplace mistreatment and violence. Drawing on witness interviews, archival records, public discourse, and experimental methods, this research investigates how observers retrospectively evaluate organizational responsibility, perceptions of foreseeability, and the perceived legitimacy of retributive responses. By integrating organizational justice with sensemaking perspectives, this work advances understanding of how individuals interpret 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 take 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 explains when organizational justice systems succeed, why they fail, and what those failures ultimately cost employees, organizations, and society.