The winding road from employee to complainant: Situational and psychological determinants of wrongful-termination claims

Structured interviews with 996 recently fired or laid-off workers provided data for analyses of the situational and psychological antecedents of both thinking about filing a wrongful-termination claim and actually filing such a claim. Potential antecedents were drawn from relational theories of orga nizational justice, economic theories about claiming, and sociolegal studie s of claiming in other contexts. Wrongful-termination claims were most stro ngly correlated with the way workers felt they had been treated at the time of termination and with their expected winnings from such a claim. Structu ral equation model analyses of panel data from follow-up interviews with 16 3 respondents four months later showed that the psychological variables wer e, in fact, causal antecedents rather than consequences of claiming thought s and actions. These findings support relational models of organizational j ustice and lead to practical suggestions for managing the termination proce ss so as to avoid wrongful-termination suits.