Weaponizing the Appraisal: Justice Violations, Psychological Safety, and Employee Voice in a Saudi Multinational Organization

1.1 Setting the Scene

The organizational imperative to construct ethically sound, respectful, and psychologically safe workplaces has received escalating attention from scholars and practitioners alike, given its deep implications for employee welfare, sustainable performance, and long-term institutional legitimacy (Leake et al., 2025; Porath & Pearson, 2013; Edmondson & Lei, 2014). The manner in which employees are treated within hierarchical structures profoundly shapes their emotional investment, sense of belonging, task engagement, and mental health (Mensah et al., 2026; Colquitt et al., 2013; Einarsen et al., 2020; Mohiya, 2026c). Conversely, when organizations tolerate or perpetuate mistreatment behavior — manifested through verbal hostility, coercive use of managerial power, discriminatory conduct, persistent bullying, or the systematic suppression of dissent — the consequences ramify across individuals, teams, and institutions (Hershcovis, 2011; Tepper et al., 2017).

Accumulating meta-analytic evidence has established the pervasive and damaging reach of workplace mistreatment. Employees exposed to abusive supervisory conduct, incivility, or discriminatory treatment report elevated rates of emotional depletion, psychological distress, compromised occupational satisfaction, weakened organizational commitment, and intensified withdrawal intentions (Leake et al., 2025; Mackey et al., 2021; Schilpzand et al., 2016; Liang et al., 2022). Beyond direct victims, witnessing colleagues being mistreated generates vicarious distress and corrodes the shared psychological safety necessary for team learning and collective effectiveness (Dollard et al., 2026; Treviño et al., 2014; Frazier et al., 2017). At the organizational level, such dynamics translate into measurable declines in productivity, inflated attrition costs, legal exposure, and reputational deterioration (Pearson & Porath, 2009).

Despite these well-documented consequences, scholarly understanding of how employees subjectively experience, interpret, and behaviorally respond to mistreatment behavior remains considerably incomplete, particularly when organizational settings depart from the Western individualist assumptions embedded in much existing research (Aycan, 2005; Pellegrini & Scandura, 2008). The Gulf Cooperation Council region, broadly, and Saudi Arabia specifically, constitute a critically underexamined terrain in organizational behavior scholarship (Mellahi & Budhwar, 2010; Budhwar & Mellahi, 2016).

1.2 Knowledge Gaps and Research Problem

Notwithstanding growing scholarly interest in ethical workplace conduct, multiple critical knowledge lacunae persist. First, quantitative survey methodologies predominate in this literature, yielding limited insight into employees’ phenomenological experiences, meaning-making processes, and contextually embedded responses to mistreatment (Lutgen-Sandvik, 2006; Tracy et al., 2006). Authentic qualitative accounts of lived experiences of mistreatment remain comparatively scarce.

Second, explicitly theory-grounded qualitative investigations that systematically situate employee accounts within established conceptual frameworks are notably absent; many qualitative studies adopt purely descriptive orientations that curtail theoretical development (Tracy et al., 2006). Third, the geographic skew toward Western organizational contexts severely limits the field’s cross-cultural generalizability (Cortina et al., 2017; Budhwar & Mellahi, 2016). Fourth, insufficient scholarly attention has been paid to the roles of organizational silence and psychological safety as possible mediating mechanisms linking mistreatment to its individual and collective consequences (Dollard et al., 2026; Morrison, 2014; Newman et al., 2017). Fifth, the intersection of employment status vulnerability with mistreatment exposure and justice perceptions remains inadequately theorized (Liden et al., 2003; Gallagher & McLean Parks, 2001).

1.3 Theoretical Underpinning

To address these gaps, this study adopts an integrated conceptual framework that draws on Organizational Justice Theory (OJT; Colquitt, 2001; Greenberg, 1987) and Psychological Safety Theory (PST; Edmondson, 1999; Kahn, 1990). This pairing is theoretically motivated by empirical evidence suggesting that both fairness appraisals and perceptions of interpersonal safety shape employees’ experiences of mistreatment.

Organizational Justice Theory offers a multi-dimensional architecture for appraising workplace treatment. Distributive justice concerns the equitability of outcome allocations (Adams, 1965); procedural justice addresses the fairness of decision-making processes (Leventhal, 1980; Thibaut & Walker, 1975); and interactional justice captures the quality of interpersonal dignity extended during organizational transactions (Bies & Moag, 1986; Colquitt, 2001). Mistreatment behavior constitutes a fundamental violation of interactional justice — conduct that strips individuals of dignity, courtesy, and informational transparency (Bies, 2015).

Psychological Safety Theory addresses individuals’ shared beliefs about the interpersonal risk of speaking up or taking action in organizational settings (Edmondson, 1999). Where psychological safety obtains, employees can voice concerns, flag errors, and challenge authority without anticipating punishment or marginalization (Kahn, 1990). Its erosion produces organizational silence — the collective suppression of potentially corrective speech — with profound consequences for learning, accountability, and institutional health (Morrison & Milliken, 2000).

The integration is theoretically synergistic: justice violations communicate to employees that environments prioritize protecting power over protecting people, directly degrading psychological safety (Nembhard & Edmondson, 2006). Simultaneously, eroded psychological safety prevents employees from voicing concerns that might disrupt ongoing justice violations, reinforcing unjust structures (Dollard et al., 2026; Detert & Burris, 2007). This bidirectionality generates self-sustaining cycles of mistreatment and silence that are resistant to superficial intervention.

1.4 Research Aim, Objectives, and Questions

This study aims to develop a rich, contextually situated, and theory-grounded understanding of how employees within a large Saudi multinational organization experience, interpret, and respond to mistreatment, with particular attention to the interplay among perceptions of organizational justice, psychological safety conditions, and employee voice behavior, and to the part played by the performance management system in shaping each.

The overarching aim generates a coherent hierarchy of inquiry. The five objectives operationalize the aim by directing attention to specific empirical and analytical tasks — characterizing behaviors, interpreting them through justice frameworks, examining safety dynamics, tracing mechanisms of silence, and analyzing contextual factors that shape employees’ experiences of and responses to such conduct. The five research questions then translate each objective into a concrete investigative focus, ensuring that every question can be traced directly to an objective and, through it, to the overarching aim. This nested structure reflects a deliberate analytic logic grounded in the study’s integrated theoretical framework.

Research Objectives:

• To identify and characterize the principal forms of mistreatment behavior encountered by employees in the research setting

• To examine how employees appraise mistreatment experiences through organizational justice frameworks

• To investigate the relationship between mistreatment exposure and psychological safety conditions

• To explore the mechanisms through which organizational silence is produced and maintained

• To analyze how contextual factors — cultural, structural, and positional — shape mistreatment experiences and responses

Research Questions:

• RQ1: What forms of mistreatment behavior are identified by employees as most consequential, and how are their impacts characterized?

• RQ2: How do employees’ mistreatment experiences intersect with their perceptions of organizational justice?

• RQ3: What is the nature of the relationship between mistreatment behavior, psychological safety, and voice behavior?

• RQ4: How do organizational systems, structures, and practices sustain or perpetuate mistreatment behavior?

• RQ5: In what ways do cultural values, hierarchical arrangements, and employment precarity shape how employees experience mistreatment and how they respond to it?

2.1 Defining Mistreatment Behavior

Mistreatment behavior refers to harmful interpersonal conduct that violates organizational dignity norms, social civility standards, and foundational principles of human respect (Leake et al., 2025; Pearson et al., 2001; Hershcovis, 2011). The scholarly literature employs a constellation of overlapping constructs — workplace aggression (Neuman & Baron, 1998), incivility (Andersson & Pearson, 1999), abusive supervision (Tepper, 2000), bullying (Einarsen et al., 2020) — that share the defining feature of actual or potential harm to employees’ welfare, dignity, or professional standing.

This study adopts an inclusive working definition: mistreatment behavior encompasses any conduct that (1) transgresses organizational values affirming dignity and respect; (2) cultivates hostile, demeaning, or intimidating workplace climates; (3) exploits asymmetric power for personal gain or retaliatory purposes; (4) discriminates based on protected or categorical characteristics; or (5) systematically suppresses or punishes employee voice. This definition deliberately encompasses both high-intensity singular incidents (direct threats, public humiliation) and cumulative low-intensity patterns (persistent exclusion, dismissiveness) whose aggregated harm is equally corrosive. This definition is grounded in the empirical evidence reviewed in Section 2.5, which documents that the most harmful workplace behaviors empirically share these characteristics: they involve power exploitation (Tepper et al., 2017), violate dignity norms (Bies, 2015), suppress voice (Morrison, 2014), and generate cumulative harm irrespective of intent (Cortina et al., 2013).

2.2 Organizational Justice Theory: A Multi-Dimensional Framework

Organizational Justice Theory constitutes an integrative conceptual system for examining how employees evaluate the fairness of their organizational experiences and how these evaluations inform their attitudes, emotions, and behavioral responses (Colquitt, 2001; Greenberg, 1987; Cohen-Charash & Spector, 2001).

Distributive justice concerns whether the allocation of organizational outcomes — rewards, recognition, advancement, sanctions — conforms to applicable equity, equality, or need-based principles (Adams, 1965). Procedural justice evaluates the fairness of the processes through which organizational decisions are reached (Leventhal, 1980; Thibaut & Walker, 1975). Leventhal’s (1980) criteria stipulate that fair procedures must be applied consistently, free from bias, grounded in accurate information, correctable, representative of affected parties, and consistent with prevailing ethical standards. Interactional justice addresses the quality of interpersonal conduct experienced during organizational processes, comprising interpersonal justice (treatment with dignity, courtesy, and respect) and informational justice (provision of adequate and transparent explanations) (Bies & Moag, 1986; Colquitt, 2001). While analytically distinct, the three justice dimensions are empirically correlated and interact in practice: interactional injustice (e.g., verbal humiliation by a supervisor) typically co-occurs with procedural injustice (biased complaint processes) and distributive injustice (unequal allocation of sanctions), creating compounded fairness deficits whose combined harm exceeds any single dimension (Colquitt et al., 2001; Ambrose & Schminke, 2009).

Meta-analytic evidence consistently reveals that justice perceptions powerfully predict organizational commitment, institutional trust, task performance, withdrawal behavior, and psychological well-being (Colquitt et al., 2013; Cropanzano et al., 2017). The ‘target similarity principle’ (Rupp & Cropanzano, 2002) further specifies that interactional injustice is most consequential when supervisor-directed, while procedural injustice carries stronger implications for organization-directed outcomes. Recent scholarship continues to affirm the framework’s vitality: Colquitt and Zipay (2015) consolidated the construct’s conceptual and measurement architecture, while Howard et al. (2020) documented how experiences of workplace exclusion shape employees’ attitudes and behavior. Koopman et al. (2022) further confirmed the predictive reach of such perceptions for citizenship and contextual performance. Qualitative evidence from Saudi organizations, in the same vein, indicates that employees construct working theories of fairness from observed leader conduct rather than from formal policy statements (Mohiya, 2026h).

2.3 Psychological Safety Theory and Organizational Silence

Psychological safety, as originally conceptualized by Edmondson (1999, p. 350), refers to ‘a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’ In psychologically safe environments, individuals engage authentically, raise concerns freely, admit errors openly, and challenge prevailing assumptions without anticipating reputational damage, social sanctioning, or career detriment (Kahn, 1990). Where such safety is absent, organizational silence prevails — employees systematically withhold observations, concerns, and critical information, depriving organizations of the upward feedback necessary for learning and correction (Morrison & Milliken, 2000).

Edmondson’s (2003, 2019) work identifies leader behavior as a primary determinant of psychological safety: leaders who model accessibility, explicitly invite dissent, acknowledge fallibility, and respond non-defensively create the conditions for voice. Conversely, punitive responses to challenge, public shaming, or coercive use of evaluation authority actively destroy psychological safety (Dollard et al., 2026; Frazier et al., 2017; Edmondson & Lei, 2014). Frazier et al.’s (2017) meta-analysis of 136 studies confirmed psychological safety as a robust predictor of organizational outcomes, while Edmondson and Bransby (2023) recently emphasized its increasing relevance in rapidly changing organizational environments. Evidence from hierarchical organizations converges on the same conclusion from the opposite direction: discretionary contribution is released only once employees judge that a threshold of perceived safety and organizational backing has been crossed (Mohiya, 2026e, 2026i).

Employee voice — ‘the discretionary communication of ideas, suggestions, concerns, or opinions about work-related issues with the intention of improving organizational or unit functioning’ (Morrison, 2011, p. 375) — represents a core behavioral expression of psychological safety. Research consistently identifies fear as the principal barrier to voice (Dollard et al., 2026; Morrison, 2014; Detert & Treviño, 2010): employees remain silent when they anticipate reputational harm, relationship damage, or material career consequences. These fears intensify dramatically when the subject of concern involves powerful organizational members (Milliken et al., 2003). Related evidence on knowledge sharing and hiding indicates that withholding is frequently a deliberate, calculated response to perceived organizational conditions rather than a symptom of disengagement (Pereira & Mohiya, 2021).

Morrison and Milliken (2000) distinguished analytically productive individual silence from systemic organizational silence, which emerges when broadly shared beliefs develop that voicing concerns is either futile or dangerous. This systemic condition generates cascading organizational pathologies: problem identification fails, cynicism spreads, accountability erodes, and mistreatment persists unchallenged (Vakola & Bouradas, 2005; Liang et al., 2022).

2.4 Bidirectional Justice–Safety Linkages

The conceptual linkage between justice and psychological safety operates bidirectionally and in a self-reinforcing manner (Simons & Roberson, 2003; Carmeli & Gittell, 2009). Justice violations — particularly interactional and procedural injustices — signal to employees that the organizational environment punishes rather than protects those who challenge misconduct, thereby directly eroding psychological safety (Nembhard & Edmondson, 2006). Simultaneously, eroded psychological safety silences employees who might otherwise voice corrective information, allowing injustices to persist and intensify (Dollard et al., 2026; Tangirala & Ramanujam, 2008). This reciprocal dynamic generates either virtuous cycles (justice → safety → voice → maintained justice) or vicious cycles (injustice → fear → silence → perpetuated injustice).

Cross-Cultural Validity of the Theoretical Frameworks: A legitimate concern exists about the transferability of theories developed predominantly in Western organizational contexts to non-Western settings. Regarding Organizational Justice Theory, Leake et al. (2025), Brockner et al. (2001), and Leung et al. (2002) provide compelling cross-cultural evidence that justice principles — particularly procedural and interactional — retain explanatory power across high- and low-power-distance cultures. What culture appears to alter is not whether fairness matters, but how fairness is enacted and read: which behaviors are recognized as violations in the first place, how serious a violation must become before employees name it, and which responses are socially permissible once it has been named. Regarding Psychological Safety Theory, Frazier et al.’s (2017) multi-country meta-analysis confirmed the theory’s cross-cultural applicability, while research in Asian and Middle Eastern contexts (Lian et al., 2012; Al-Kahtani et al., 2021) has shown that psychological safety dynamics operate similarly across collectivist, high power-distance settings. Evidence from Saudi organizations points in the same direction: employees there evaluate leaders’ conduct against fairness criteria that mainstream constructs describe well, even where the idiom in which those judgments are voiced remains locally specific (Mohiya, 2023). The current study, therefore, treats both frameworks as culturally portable while acknowledging that their specific manifestations are shaped by Saudi Arabian organizational culture, Islamic values, and collectivist relational norms — an approach consistent with universalist-contextual theoretical integration (Gelfand et al., 2011).

2.5 Empirical Literature on Mistreatment Behavior

3.1 Philosophical Positioning and Research Approach

This investigation employs a qualitative, exploratory, theory-informed single-case study design (Yin, 2018), oriented toward generating a rich, contextually situated understanding of the dynamics of mistreatment behavior within a large Saudi Arabian multinational organization. This design choice is appropriate for examining complex, context-embedded phenomena whose meaning cannot be abstracted from their organizational and cultural settings (Stake, 1995; Flyvbjerg, 2011). Single-case and qualitatively triangulated designs of this kind have proved productive in earlier investigations of employee experience in Saudi settings (Mohiya, 2024a, 2024b, 2026f).

Philosophically, the study operates within a social constructivist epistemological tradition (Berger & Luckmann, 1966), treating individual and collective meaning-making as constitutive of organizational reality. Simultaneously, a critical realist ontological commitment (Bhaskar, 1978) is maintained, acknowledging that although interpretations are socially produced, underlying structural mechanisms — hierarchical power, institutional arrangements, cultural norms — exert causal influence on employees’ experiences independent of individual perception (Danermark et al., 2002). This dual positioning enables the study to honor phenomenological complexity while retaining analytical traction on structural dynamics. This dual ontological-epistemological positioning is consistent with recent qualitative organizational scholarship (Cunliffe, 2011; Creswell & Poth, 2018) and has been deployed effectively in comparable studies of workplace behavior (Lutgen-Sandvik & Tracy, 2012; Tracy, 2020).

3.2 Research Setting

The research was conducted within a large multinational corporation headquartered in Saudi Arabia, which operates in the energy and industrial sectors and employs more than 60,000 people. The organization encompasses extensive international operations and employs a highly heterogeneous workforce comprising Saudi nationals, Arab expatriates, South and Southeast Asian professionals, and Western specialists. It publicly articulates strong commitments to professional management, corporate integrity, and respect-based workplace culture.

Case Boundaries: The case is bounded by: (1) organizational scope — all data were collected from employees working within the organization’s Saudi Arabian operations; (2) temporal scope — data were generated between 2014 and 2020; (3) substantive scope — the case concerns the organizational phenomenon of mistreatment behavior as experienced and interpreted by employees. The study does not extend to customers, external stakeholders, or employees in the organization’s international operations outside Saudi Arabia. These explicit boundaries are consistent with Yin’s (2018) guidelines for single-case study design.

The organization was selected through purposive sampling based on: (1) sufficient scale and structural complexity to generate diverse and differentiated mistreatment experiences; (2) workforce heterogeneity enabling analysis of nationality, employment category, and cultural background as contextual conditions; (3) the existence of formal policies explicitly prohibiting workplace misconduct; (4) researcher access to organizational data; and (5) representativeness for large Middle Eastern organizations navigating modernization pressures while maintaining hierarchical structures.

Transparency Regarding Case Selection: The selection of this particular organization may have been driven more by data availability (access to the internal communication platform) than by a systematic comparison of candidate organizations. I acknowledge this openly. The case was identified through the primary researcher’s professional access to the organization’s internal platform, and no formal multi-candidate comparison process was conducted. The five selection criteria (size, diversity, formal policies, data access, representativeness) are applied retrospectively as justificatory criteria rather than as a prospective selection algorithm. This represents a genuine limitation of the research design. The case is treated as a theoretically purposive rather than systematically comparative selection, and the study’s findings should be interpreted accordingly — as generating theoretical propositions for future multi-case testing rather than as representative of all large Middle Eastern multinationals.

3.3 Data Sources and Collection Procedures

3.4 Sampling and Participant Profiles

The 197 internal communication comments constitute a self-selected convenience sample. Complete demographic data were unavailable for all contributors; the platform did not systematically collect or attach demographic identifiers to posts. What is known contextually is that the platform was accessible to all permanent and contract employees across the organization’s Saudi Arabian operations, and that the thread generated sustained engagement over six months, suggesting contributors represented diverse organizational constituencies. However, I explicitly acknowledge that this constitutes a convenience sample of self-selecting employees, and representativeness cannot be verified or guaranteed. Specifically, I recognize that employees experiencing mistreatment may be overrepresented, and — critically — that within the group of affected employees, those experiencing the most severe fears of retaliation may be systematically underrepresented, since such employees are precisely those least likely to post in a semi-public forum. Readers should interpret findings from the blog data with this dual selection bias in mind and use their own judgment about the degree of representativeness. The interview data, collected in private settings with confidentiality guarantees, provide a complementary dataset less subject to these specific biases.

Interview participants were recruited through a combination of purposive and snowball sampling strategies (Patton, 2015), designed to ensure representation across gender, nationality, employment category, organizational level, and tenure—see Table 1 below for participant demographics.

Sampling Adequacy and Thematic Saturation: Sampling continued until thematic saturation was reached — the point at which additional interviews yielded no substantively new codes or themes (Guest et al., 2006). Saturation was assessed iteratively: after the 30th interview, no new first-order codes were generated. Interviews 31–39 served as a confirmatory phase, validating the stability of the thematic structure. This process yielded the five-theme structure presented in Section 4, which I consider adequately saturated, given the purposive sampling strategy that targets maximum diversity across key characteristics.

3.5 Analytical Approach: Reflexive Thematic Analysis

Data were analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006, 2019) reflexive thematic analysis framework, which provides a systematic, philosophically coherent, and flexible methodology for identifying, interpreting, and reporting patterns of meaning within qualitative data. This approach accommodates both inductive (data-driven) and deductive (theory-informed) coding orientations (Braun & Clarke, 2012; Terry et al., 2017).

Phase 1 (Familiarization): Immersive, repeated engagement with the entire dataset enabled initial intuitive sense-making and notation of preliminary analytical observations.

Phase 2 (Initial Code Generation): Systematic line-by-line coding was applied across both data sources, generating deductive codes anchored in theoretical constructs (e.g., ‘procedural injustice,’ ‘fear of retaliation’) alongside inductive codes arising organically from the data (e.g., ‘performance rating weaponization,’ ‘agency worker dehumanization’). NVivo 12 was employed for data management. The coding process involved two researchers: the primary researcher (the author) and an independent research collaborator with expertise in qualitative organizational research. Both researchers independently coded a stratified random subsample of 40% of the dataset (approximately 79 internal communications and 16 interviews). Inter-coder reliability was assessed using Cohen’s kappa, yielding κ = 0.81, indicating strong agreement (Landis & Koch, 1977). Disagreements were resolved through discussion and consensus. The remaining data were coded by the primary researcher, with periodic audit checks by the collaborator.

Phase 3 (Theme Construction): Initial codes were clustered and reorganized into candidate thematic categories representing broader, analytically coherent patterns of meaning.

Phase 4 (Thematic Review and Refinement): Candidate themes were iteratively assessed against the full dataset to ensure internal coherence and meaningful differentiation between themes (Patton, 2015).

Phase 5 (Theme Definition and Naming): Each theme was precisely defined and bounded, its scope articulated, and its relationship to the study’s research questions and theoretical framework specified.

Phase 6 (Report Production): The final analytic narrative integrates themes with theoretical elaboration, illustrative quotations, and cross-data source triangulation.

3.6 Quality, Rigor, and Trustworthiness

Credibility was strengthened through data source triangulation (internal communications and interviews), prolonged researcher engagement with the organizational context, member checking of interview interpretations with participants, and peer analytic debriefing. Transferability is supported by thick, contextually detailed descriptions and the theoretically grounded analytical framework that facilitates principled extrapolation to comparable settings. Dependability was assured through a systematic audit trail, multi-coder involvement, inter-rater reliability assessment, and adherence to transparent analytic procedures. Confirmability was promoted through explicit reflexive positioning, systematic grounding of interpretations in verbatim data, and avoidance of unsupported inferential leaps (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Guba & Lincoln, 2005). To provide more than a nominal checklist, the following procedural specifics are offered: (1) Member checking involved sharing thematic summaries with six interview participants drawn purposively from different organizational levels and nationalities; all confirmed the resonance of the themes with their experiences, and two offered minor clarifications that refined the articulation of Theme E. (2) Peer debriefing involved two iterative sessions with a senior qualitative researcher external to the project, who challenged analytical interpretations and identified one instance of overgeneralization in the early draft of the model. (3) Thick description is embedded throughout Section 4 through verbatim quotation and contextual commentary, providing readers with sufficient grounding to assess transferability independently.

3.7 Ethical Considerations

This study was conducted with the approval of the Deanship of Scientific Research Ethics Committee (approval reference: ECM#2026-1101) and in strict accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (2013). All interview participants provided fully informed written consent before participation. Participants were explicitly guaranteed the right to voluntary participation, unrestricted withdrawal rights, complete anonymity, and exclusive use of data for academic purposes. Internal communication data were treated as secondary organizational data; all identifying information was systematically anonymized before analysis, and data were stored in encrypted, access-controlled repositories accessible exclusively to the research team. The approval reference number (ECM#2026-1101) is consistently reported both here and in the Declarations section.

Ethical Considerations for Blog Data: The ethical treatment of the internal communication data requires specific justification. Employees posting on the internal platform could reasonably expect their comments to be read by colleagues, HR staff, and management — the platform’s explicit function was to facilitate organizational dialogue. In this sense, while employees did not expect full privacy, they did have a reasonable expectation that their comments would serve an internal organizational rather than an external research purpose. To address this ethical complexity: (1) all comments were fully anonymized before analysis, with organizational roles, names, and identifiable contextual details removed; (2) the research received explicit ethical approval covering the use of this data type; (3) no attempt was made to re-identify contributors; and (4) verbatim quotations presented in the manuscript are presented at a level of generality that prevents identification. I acknowledge the ethical tension between using data posted for organizational rather than research purposes, and I have sought to handle it with the care that this complexity demands.

Formal organizational access was negotiated with the organization’s senior management and HR leadership before the commencement of the interview phase. Management was informed of the research’s academic purpose, the voluntary nature of participation, and the strict confidentiality protections applied to all data. Organizational gatekeepers facilitated recruitment through internal communication channels, though they had no visibility into which individual employees chose to participate, nor into the content of interviews. This arrangement balanced organizational access requirements with the independence necessary for authentic participant disclosure.

4.1 Theme A: Authority Misuse and Supervisory Coercion (32%)

The most prominent thematic category captured systematic patterns of supervisory power misuse, manifested through verbal hostility, intimidatory conduct, and the deliberate manipulation of evaluation systems for coercive ends. These behaviors constituted compounded violations of interactional justice intensified by structural power asymmetry.

4.2 Theme B: Suppression of Employee Voice and Retaliatory Culture (27%)

The second thematic category documented pervasive, fear-driven organizational silence in which employees systematically withheld concerns about mistreatment, not from indifference, but from rational anticipation of adverse consequences — directly engaging psychological safety theory.

4.3 Theme C: Structural and Procedural Inequities (20%)

Beyond interpersonal mistreatment, employees identified deeply embedded organizational arrangements that generate systemic unfairness and compound individual-level experiences of injustice.

4.4 Theme D: Organizational Betrayal and Eroded Institutional Confidence (14%)

This thematic category captured employees’ perceptions of fundamental discrepancies between organizational commitments to dignity and fairness and the institutional realities they experienced, which they regarded as profound violations of the psychological contract.

4.5 Theme E: Socio-Cultural and Institutional Conditions (7%)

The final thematic category illuminated how cultural values, religious frameworks, and institutional context shaped both normative expectations regarding workplace conduct and behavioral responses to violations of those expectations.

4.6 Synthesizing the Findings: The Justice–Safety Vicious Cycle Model

The Justice–Safety Vicious Cycle Model was constructed through an inductive-deductive process. Each of the six stages emerged directly from the thematic analysis rather than being imposed theoretically: Stage 1 (justice violations) from Themes A and C; Stages 2–3 (safety erosion and voice suppression) from Theme B; Stage 4 (procedural failure) from Themes C and D; Stage 5 (escalated violations) from Themes A and D; Stage 6 (institutional distrust and cynicism) from Theme D. The cyclical return from Stage 6 to Stage 1 is empirically grounded in Theme D sub-theme D4, wherein employees with accumulated distrust explicitly stated they would no longer seek redress for fresh incidents — closing the cycle rather than terminating it linearly. Each stage is cross-validated against Organizational Justice Theory (Colquitt, 2001; Greenberg, 1987) and Psychological Safety Theory (Edmondson, 1999; Kahn, 1990) and is supported by the specific literature cited in Figure 1. The model was iteratively refined through two peer debriefing sessions with an independent qualitative researcher.

Figure 1

Synthesizing Sections 4.1–4.5, the model identifies six mutually implicating stages (see Figure 1): (1) initial justice violations — verbal aggression, favoritism, and contractor discrimination constitute interactional and distributive injustice (Bies & Moag, 1986; Tepper et al., 2017); (2) psychological safety erosion — justice violations signal that environments punish rather than protect dignity (Edmondson, 1999; Kahn, 1990); (3) voice suppression and organizational silence — degraded safety produces systematic withholding of concerns (Morrison & Milliken, 2000; Milliken et al., 2003); (4) procedural failure — absent voice leaves accountability mechanisms dormant, violating consistency and bias-suppression criteria (Leventhal, 1980); (5) continued and escalated violations — unchecked perpetrators normalize misconduct while victims are punished for resistance (Tepper et al., 2017; Pearson & Porath, 2009); and (6) deepened institutional distrust and cynicism — accumulated injustice collapses safety further and restarts the cycle with amplified intensity (Dean et al., 1998; Robinson & Rousseau, 1994). Cultural and structural factors — high power distance, collectivism, employment status hierarchies, and Islamic values (Theme E, 7%) — function as amplifiers at each stage rather than as primary causal agents (Hofstede, 2001; Gelfand et al., 2007).

The model is presented as a conceptual framework that generates testable propositions, not as a statistically verified causal model. Temporal sequencing and directionality require future quantitative longitudinal testing (Section 6.5).

5.1 Theoretical Implications for Organizational Justice

The findings robustly support and meaningfully extend Organizational Justice Theory. Consistent with Bies and Moag (1986) and subsequent literature, employees’ most salient concerns centered on interactional injustice—treatment that violated norms of dignity, respect, and courtesy, particularly when enacted by supervisors. These violations generated intense emotional responses and behavioral adaptations, aligning with established justice effects (Mensah et al., 2026; Colquitt et al., 2013). The ‘target similarity principle’ (Rupp & Cropanzano, 2002) is confirmed: supervisor-directed interactional injustice proved disproportionately harmful.

The research extends justice theory by demonstrating compounding justice effects. Rather than experiencing justice dimensions in discrete ways, employees encountered simultaneous, interacting injustices whose combined harm exceeded that of any single dimension: initial interactional violations (verbal aggression) were compounded by distributive violations (rewards to perpetrators, penalties for victims) and procedural violations (biased investigations, inconsistent enforcement). This finding argues for configurational approaches examining justice profiles rather than isolated dimensional effects in future research.

A novel theoretical contribution concerns the identification of procedural justice mechanisms as part of the psychological safety infrastructure. Fair procedures that meet Leventhal’s (1980) criteria serve not merely to generate direct fairness perceptions but also to signal whether environments safely accommodate voice. When complaint processes operate inconsistently and fail to protect complainants, they signal both procedural unfairness and the futility and danger of speaking up. This dual signaling function suggests organizations cannot meaningfully decouple procedural justice design from psychological safety cultivation — they are systemically intertwined. This integration enriches both theoretical literatures.

Regarding cross-cultural applicability, findings both support and nuance existing theory. While some participants acknowledged cultural norms of hierarchical deference that might normalize certain supervisory latitude, the substantial majority condemned mistreatment conduct across all cultural backgrounds by appeal to universal dignity principles and Islamic ethical frameworks. This pattern supports arguments for the cross-cultural relevance of fundamental justice principles (Leung et al., 2002; Brockner et al., 2001) while confirming that cultural context shapes the expression, thresholds, and response repertoires of mistreatment. The research also reveals that justice theory retains analytical traction in non-Western collectivist contexts, though it requires contextually sensitive application.

5.2 Theoretical Implications for Psychological Safety

The findings powerfully confirm the centrality of psychological safety to understanding mistreatment dynamics (Edmondson, 1999; Morrison & Milliken, 2000). Employees suppressed their voices not out of disengagement or indifference, but out of rational assessments that disclosure would trigger disproportionate adverse consequences. The specific constellation of barriers identified — career retaliation fears, informal social sanctions, anticipated futility, deep institutional distrust — aligns precisely with established voice-suppression mechanisms (Milliken et al., 2003; Morrison, 2014; Frazier et al., 2017).

The research identifies performance management weaponization as a theoretically distinctive and practically significant destroyer of psychological safety. By controlling career-consequential outcomes — bonus allocations, promotion decisions, training access, employment continuation — supervisors possess extraordinary coercive leverage over voice behavior. This finding extends psychological safety theory beyond its traditional focus on interpersonal dynamics and leader behavior to encompass organizational systems and institutional arrangements that either enable or constrain safe voice. The implication is that psychological safety research and practice must attend to system-level safeguards, not only interpersonal climate.

The findings support and enrich Morrison and Milliken’s (2000) systemic organizational silence construct. Data reveal not merely aggregated individual silence but climate-level collective beliefs that voice generates harm rather than organizational benefit. Vicarious learning from observed punishment of voice is central to this collective belief formation (Bandura, 1977; Newman et al., 2017). This finding supports interventions targeting systemic beliefs and organizational climate, not merely individual voice behavior. It also identifies a cost that is easily overlooked: where employees withhold what they know, the knowledge exchange on which organizational performance partly rests is curtailed at the source (Mohiya, 2026d).

The research extends Edmondson’s (2019) leadership-centered framework by identifying safety-destroying behaviors as a theoretically and practically important complement to safety-building behaviors. Where prior theory has emphasized what leaders do to build safety (invite input, model fallibility, respond non-defensively), this study documents the systematic, destructive effects of threats, public humiliation, and retaliatory conduct — a bidirectional framework with significant practical implications.

Finally, the findings suggest that cultural and structural factors amplify psychological safety barriers through multiplicative rather than merely additive effects. High power distance intensifies fears of challenging authority; collectivist harmony norms compound concerns about relational damage; employment precarity magnifies perceptions of career threat. These interactions demand culturally contextualized theory development (Gelfand et al., 2011).

5.3 The Justice–Safety Vicious Cycle: An Integrative Theoretical Contribution

A note on terminology properly precedes the model. Throughout this section, associative language describes conceptual relationships proposed by the integrated theoretical framework and supported thematically by the empirical material; it does not assert statistical association, causal direction, or temporal ordering in the quantitative sense. The Justice–Safety Vicious Cycle Model organizes observed patterns into a coherent explanatory narrative and should be read accordingly.

The study’s most substantive theoretical contribution is the Justice–Safety Vicious Cycle Model, which explains how violations of organizational justice and the degradation of psychological safety interact in self-sustaining, self-amplifying cycles.

The model’s principal theoretical advances are: first, it suggests justice and safety are not merely correlated constructs but mutually constitutive, dynamically interacting phenomena incapable of meaningful independent resolution; second, it specifies a temporal sequence — justice violations → safety erosion → voice suppression → procedural failures → continued injustice → further safety collapse — whose sequencing is critical for intervention design; third, it reveals the self-amplifying momentum of each cycle iteration, explaining why superficial interventions reliably fail; and fourth, it identifies multiple potential intervention leverage points requiring simultaneous activation. Prior research acknowledging justice-safety connections (Carmeli & Gittell, 2009; Simons & Roberson, 2003) has not provided the detailed empirical grounding and formal cycle model this study contributes. Importantly, consistent with the exploratory qualitative methodology employed, these theoretical advances are presented as conceptual propositions warranting future empirical scrutiny rather than as verified causal claims. Cross-validation through quantitative longitudinal studies, as outlined in Section 6.5, is necessary before strong causal conclusions can be drawn.

5.4 Novel Empirical Contributions

The research identifies several phenomena that have received limited prior empirical attention. Performance management weaponization — the systematic, deliberate manipulation of performance evaluation processes to punish voice, enforce compliance, and retaliate against complaints — extends research on performance appraisal politics (Cropanzano et al., 2017) by documenting coercive weaponization as a distinct, systematic control mechanism with profound implications for system design.

Employment status intersectional vulnerabilities extend contingent worker research (Liden et al., 2003; Gallagher & McLean Parks, 2001) by demonstrating that contract and agency employees experience not additive but multiplicative risks at the nexus of employment precarity, power asymmetry, and voice constraint — a compounded vulnerability demanding structural rather than individual-level intervention.

The policy-hypocrisy dynamic — in which organizations espousing strong ethical commitments while systematically tolerating violations generate more corrosive cynicism than organizations without such commitments — extends psychological contract breach theory (Morrison & Robinson, 1997; Simons, 2002) by specifying the particularly toxic nature of proclaimed-but-unenforced commitments.

5.5 Contextual Dynamics

The research contributes to the field of underrepresented Middle Eastern organizational scholarship (Mellahi & Budhwar, 2010) while illuminating the tension between contextual particularities and universal principles. Context-specific dynamics include high power distance norms that strengthen hierarchical deference expectations, collectivist values that amplify harmony-preservation voice inhibitions, Islamic ethical frameworks that provide powerful normative condemnation of mistreatment, and complex tribal-kinship-national status intersections that create multidimensional power structures. These factors shape the expression, threshold, and response repertoires of mistreatment in organizationally significant ways.

Nevertheless, universal principles emerged unambiguously: fundamental dignity and respect needs proved consistent across all national and cultural backgrounds; justice violations produced negative evaluations regardless of cultural origin; and employees from all backgrounds converged in condemning abusive conduct. The implication is clear: organizations in non-Western contexts cannot invoke cultural relativity to dismiss mistreatment as inappropriate Western impositions. Employees universally value dignity and fairness. Cultural sensitivity in intervention design is essential, but organizational ‘culture’ cannot serve as a legitimizing cover for tolerating abuse.

Alignment with the Study’s Operational Definition: It is instructive to assess how the empirical findings align with the operational definition of mistreatment behavior established at the outset of the study. The definition proposed five criteria: (1) violation of dignity and respect norms; (2) cultivation of hostile or demeaning climates; (3) exploitation of asymmetric power; (4) discrimination on categorical characteristics; and (5) suppression of employee voice. All five criteria received robust empirical support across the five themes. Criteria (1) and (2) are most directly evidenced in Theme A; criterion (3) is clarified in both Themes A and C; criterion (4) is documented in Theme C (particularly employment-status discrimination and nepotism); and criterion (5) is the central focus of Theme B. This alignment confirms that the adopted definition was operationally productive and empirically generative, capturing the full range of mistreatment phenomena encountered in the research setting.

Implications for Western Organizational Contexts: Although the research is situated in a Saudi Arabian organizational setting, several findings resonate strongly with documented patterns in Western workplaces and carry transferable implications. The dynamics of performance management weaponization, the fear-driven suppression of voice, the policy-practice gap, and the protection of perpetrators at the expense of victims have been documented in Western organizational contexts by Tepper et al. (2017), Morrison (2014), and Cortina and Magley (2009), respectively. These convergences suggest that the Justice–Safety Vicious Cycle Model may have cross-cultural applicability, with cultural context (power distance, collectivism, Islamic values) conditioning the intensity and expression of these dynamics rather than constituting a distinct causal factor. At the same time, the specific mechanisms identified — wasta-mediated favoritism, Vision 2030 generational tensions, and religious-ethical framing of mistreatment — are contextually particular and do not directly transfer to Western settings. The study thus contributes to a cross-cultural organizational behavior literature that emphasizes both universal principles and contextually contingent processes (Gelfand et al., 2011), suggesting that future comparative research should examine how these dynamics manifest across varying cultural configurations.

6.1 Theoretical Contributions Summary

This study makes four substantive theoretical contributions. First, it advances Organizational Justice Theory by demonstrating interactive and compounding justice effects, establishing procedural justice as a psychological safety infrastructure, and extending the theory’s applicability to non-Western hierarchical collectivist contexts. Second, it advances Psychological Safety Theory by identifying safety-destroying leadership behaviors as theoretically important counterparts to safety-building behaviors, extending the theory to encompass organizational systems, and documenting cultural amplification of safety barriers. Third, the Justice–Safety Vicious Cycle Model offers an original integrative theoretical framework formally modeling the bidirectional, self-perpetuating relationship between justice erosion and psychological safety degradation. Fourth, the research identifies novel empirical phenomena — performance management weaponization, intersectional employment-status vulnerabilities, and policy-hypocrisy cynicism — thereby opening productive new research directions.

6.2 Practical Recommendations

6.3 Methodological Contributions

The integration of naturally occurring internal digital discourse data with semi-structured interview data represents a significant methodological contribution. This approach combines the authenticity and lack of social desirability filtering characteristic of naturally occurring data with the depth and probing capacity of interview-based inquiry. The convergence of findings across these epistemologically distinct sources substantially strengthens credibility and extends a triangulation logic applied in earlier qualitative investigations of employee experience (Mohiya, 2024a, 2024b). The study’s approach of systematically applying established theoretical frameworks to qualitative data indicates how theory-driven analysis generates both richness and analytical depth, bridging exploratory qualitative and theory-testing quantitative research traditions.

6.4 Limitations

The study’s single-case design limits direct generalizability, though theoretical propositions are offered as transferable insights subject to contextual testing. Self-selection into both data sources may overrepresent employees with heightened salience of mistreatment. Social desirability bias cannot be fully eliminated, even with confidentiality assurances, particularly in high-power-distance contexts. The bounded data collection windows (2014 for the platform corpus; 2017–2020 for the interviews) preclude examination of temporal dynamics. Future research should address these limitations through comparative multi-site designs, longitudinal tracking, and complementary methodologies. A more nuanced self-selection limitation operates in the blog data: not only may employees experiencing mistreatment be overrepresented relative to unaffected employees, but within the group of affected employees, those fearing the most severe retaliation are likely underrepresented, since these individuals are least likely to post on a semi-public platform. This dual selection dynamic means the blog data may simultaneously under-represent both the least affected employees and the most severely silenced victims — leaving a particular stratum (employees who experienced mistreatment but retained some capacity and willingness to voice) as the most visible group. Additionally, the 2014 origin of the blog data introduces a temporal limitation: organizational culture may have evolved in subsequent years. The study’s cross-temporal triangulation with 2017–2020 interview data partially addresses this, though not fully. Furthermore, the social desirability concern applies differentially. While anonymization was applied before analysis, employees posting on a semi-public platform at the time of posting were not anonymous, which likely suppressed the expression of the most sensitive concerns. The interview data, conducted under stronger confidentiality conditions, provide a partial corrective.

6.5 Future Research Agenda

The findings suggest six productive research directions: (1) comparative investigation across multiple Saudi organizations varying in sector, ownership, and size; (2) systematic cross-cultural comparison of mistreatment dynamics across Middle Eastern and Western organizational contexts; (3) longitudinal studies tracking the temporal evolution of justice perceptions, psychological safety, and voice behavior; (4) quasi-experimental evaluation of specific interventions — accountability mechanisms, voice infrastructure, leadership development — targeting identified cycle stages; (5) multi-level hierarchical modeling examining nested individual, team, and organizational level dynamics simultaneously, in the spirit of microfoundational accounts that trace organization-level outcomes to individual-level mechanisms (La Sala et al., 2023); and (6) theoretical extension testing boundary conditions of the Justice–Safety Vicious Cycle Model and exploring mechanisms through which virtuous cycles might emerge and sustain.