Am I next? Men and women’s divergent justice perceptions following vicarious mistreatment.

Though we would like to believe that people universally consider workplace mistreatment to be an indicator of injustice, we describe why bystanders can react to justice events (in this study, vicariously observing or becoming aware of others being mistreated) with diverging perceptions of organizational injustice. We show that a bystander's gender and their gender similarity to the target of mistreatment can produce identity threat, which affects whether bystanders perceive the overall organization to be rife with gendered mistreatment and unfairness. Identity threat develops via two pathways-an emotion-focused reaction and a cognitive-focused processing of the event-and each pathway distally relates to different levels of bystanders' justice perceptions. We test these notions in three complementary studies: two laboratory experiments (