Cutting off your nose to spite your face: A justice perspective on damaging an alma mater's reputational ranking

Although economic self-interest and self-enhancement theory predict that gr aduates will maximize their alma maters' reputational rankings, anecdotal e vidence indicates that some graduates denigrate their alma maters' reputati ons when surveyed by the external media. Using organizational justice theor ies to motivate our hypotheses, we conducted a longitudinal investigation o f 161 graduates from one university and predicted their intentions to badmo uth their school to the external media. Results suggest that, controlling f or perceptions of school quality, graduates used badmouthing to "punish" th eir alma maters when they perceived the fairness of job-search processes an d outcomes to be low. Moreover, the relationship between justice and badmou thing was interactive, such that procedural justice mattered most when dist ributive justice was low, highlighting the role of career offices in univer sities' reputational rankings.