Where does ostracism collide?

The degree to which an employee feels ignored or excluded by others in the workplace: not open hostility, but the quieter experience of being left out of conversations, greetings, and invitations by colleagues or supervisors. Ferris, Brown, Berry, and Lian's 2008 The development and validation of the Workplace Ostracism Scale built and tested a self-report measure of how often a worker feels shut out on the job, and linked it to lower well-being and weaker attachment to work. This referent is a measured experience inside one organization, reported by the person who feels excluded, and it is not the general laboratory reaction to exclusion, the ancient political institution, or the excluding behavior seen across animal species.[1]

Unit

One employee's reported degree of being ignored or excluded at work

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed by self-report on the Workplace Ostracism Scale, rating how often colleagues ignore or exclude the respondent

Being ignored and excluded by others, studied as a general human experience that threatens basic needs: on this account, being left out, even briefly and even by strangers, wounds a person's feeling of belonging, control, self-worth, and meaningful existence before they can reason about it. Williams's 2007 review Ostracism, in the Annual Review of Psychology, set out this need-threat model, drawing on controlled work such as Williams and Sommer's 1997 study of exclusion among coworkers in a laboratory task. This referent is a broad psychological reaction to exclusion, produced and probed in experiments, and it differs from the workplace-specific rating scale, the Athenian civic procedure, and the excluding behavior of animal groups.[2][3]

Unit

A person's reaction to a single episode of being excluded

Recovery means

After exclusion ends, people often act to repair belonging, by conforming, seeking new contact, or sometimes turning aggressive

Measured by

Studied experimentally, often with the Cyberball ball-tossing task, followed by ratings of threatened needs and mood

Ostracism treated as an evolved behavior in which a social group withdraws from, avoids, or drives out one of its own members, seen not only in people but across social animal species: the biological view asks what function such exclusion serves for the group and what triggers it. Gruter and Masters's 1986 introduction Ostracism as a social and biological phenomenon, in Ethology and Sociobiology, framed exclusion as a widespread pattern rooted in animal social life with possible survival value. This referent is a cross-species behavioral pattern studied by ethologists, and it is distinct from the workplace experience, the laboratory model of threatened needs, and the ancient Athenian vote.[4]

Unit

An instance of a group excluding, avoiding, or driving out one member

Recovery means

An excluded animal may rejoin the group, disperse to another, or fail to survive alone

Measured by

Observed in the field or in captivity as withdrawal from, avoidance of, or aggression that drives out a group member