the Footnotes to The Winding Road



(1.) An analogous argument has been raised in the context of divorce Suits (DiFonzo, 1997).

(2.) Some respondents had lost their jobs and, the same day, had gone directly to the
unemployment office to inquire about benefits. When we encountered these people, we
allowed them to participate in the interviews, since they were unemployed, but we coded the
days since they lost their job as 0.

(3.) We make no assertion that our sample is representative of either working people or the
recently unemployed. Because our focus in this study was on the interrelationships between
variables, any lack of representativeness in our sample is less of a problem than it would be if
we had been interested in estimating the absolute levels of any variables.

(4.) On all closed-ended scales, unless otherwise noted, each option was given a numeric
value starting at the option representing the least affirmative answer to the question. Thus, for
this question the options (and their associated numeric values) were "not at all" (1),
"somewhat" (2), "very much" (3), and "a great deal" (4).

(5.) It could be argued that the claiming index could be considered a Guttman scale with three
sequential steps: no action, talking to someone, and claiming. We used the averaging
approach, however, because a respondent could claim without talking to a lawyer or an Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) official (about 10 percent of our claimers did
this) and because in some instances merely talking to a lawyer might result in more important
personal and organizational consequences than would an unassisted filing. When we
reanalyzed the data using a Guttman-like rescaling of the claiming-action index, however, the
results reported here were unchanged.

(6.) For all scales with internal consistency reliabilities lower than .70, we conducted additional
analyses using each individual component of the scale as the appropriate independent or
dependent variable. In every case, the patterns of statistical significance were identical to
those obtained with the whole scale. Furthermore, most of the analyses used structural
equation modeling, a procedure that adjusts for differences in reliability across scales.

(7.) The relatively low reliabilities for the blaming indices may result from the fact that our
"reason" question did not differentiate between legitimate, acceptable reasons and
blameworthy reasons. When we analyzed the data using the fault questions only, we obtained
results virtually identical to those reported here.

(8.) We did not ask about the perceived cost of litigation for two reasons. First, we suspected
that claimants would not have a clear idea of the costs involved. Second, the costs to the
claimant typically are borne by government agencies (in some protected-class discrimination
claims) or are a simple function of the size of the award, given that wrongful-termination cases
are likely to be accepted by attorneys with whom claimants have made contingent-fee
arrangements (Dertouzos, Holland, and Ebener, 1988). In either case, the costs are reflected
in responses to other variables considered in this study.

(9.) The low Cronbach's alpha at Time 2 can be explained in terms of changes in perceived
financial hardship with the passage of time without concomitant changes in feelings about
being dismissed. As time passed, financial hardship increased among those who were not
reemployed but decreased among those who were reemployed, although feelings about
dismissal were relatively stable over time. Still, the low level of internal consistency called for
analyzing the results separately for each variable. Doing so, we found the same pattern of
results for the individual items as we did for the composite.

(10.) Although one of the exogenous variables, help by employer, was measured in rather
subjective terms, we felt that the reports were probably less subjective than were perceptions
of treatment on the job or at termination or blaming, so we put this variable in the exogenous
category.

(11.) The test used a hierarchical [[chi].sup.2] comparison of the difference between the
goodness of fit [[chi].sup.2] for the structural equation model in which the two paths in question
were constrained to be equal and the goodness of fit [[chi].sup.2] for a model in which the two
paths were free to differ; [[chi].sup.2](1) = 13.84, p [less than] .001.

(12.) We repeated this analysis, predicting consideration and claiming from the unstandardized
concern with fairness and dignified treatment variables, and found the same pattern of
significant quadratic and linear trends, suggesting that the effect is not a scale or recoding
artifact.

(13.) We also conducted a general test for moderation of any of the other antecedents of
claiming by the fired versus laid-off workers and found no evidence of other path moderations.

(14.) We tested whether treatment on the job and treatment at termination interacted in their
effects on claiming insofar as it might be argued that poor treatment at termination is especially
distasteful when one expects better, but a statistically significant interaction was not found.

(15.) It may well be that this figure is an underestimate of the cost of bad treatment at
termination insofar as both litigation costs and wrongful-termination awards have risen
substantially since the RAND study was completed. Whether it is a good general estimate
depends on how representative our sample is of all terminated employees, a concern we
discuss below.

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Publication Information: Article Title: The Winding Road from Employee to Complainant:
Situational and Psychological Determinants of Wrongful-Termination Claims. Contributors:
Jerald Greenberg - author, E. Allan Lind - author, Kimberly S. Scott - author, Thomas D.
Welchans - author. Journal Title: Administrative Science Quarterly. Volume: 45. Issue: 3.
Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 557. COPYRIGHT 2000 Cornell University, Johnson
Graduate School; COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group