The Electronic Water Cooler: Insiders and Outsiders Talk About Organizational Justice on the Internet

The boundary between organizational insiders (e.g., employees) and outsiders (e.g., customers) has become increasingly permeable due to Internet discussion boards that enable members of both groups to share experiences of organizational fairness and unfairness. We studied discussion board threads on Vault.com, focusing on threads initiated by postings containing organizational justice content and authored by an organizational insider or outsider. Consistent with predictions of the social identity model of deindividuation effects, organizational insiders capitalized on anonymity to post messages that were significantly more negative in both cognitive content (describing organizations as less fair) and emotional tone (using more negative emotional language) than messages posted by organizational outsiders. As predicted by contagion theory, cognitive content influenced the emotional tone of reply messages, especially when initial postings were from organizational outsiders.