Organizations have recently experienced an increase in employees openly discussing personal experiences of victimization, presenting both opportunities and challenges for workplace relationships. The present research introduces the concept of perceptions of workplace victim signaling (WVS) — defined as an employee’s subjective appraisal of the frequency with which other employees at work publicly communicate their disadvantages, suffering, oppression, or personal limitations. Drawing on paranoid cognition theory (Kramer, 2001), we predict that perceptions of WVS can trigger paranoid cognitions, leading to their expectations of adversarial conflict with coworkers from social groups different from their own (i.e., race, gender, and political orientation). We further propose that these expectations can result in increased withdrawal behavior and a lower tendency to support coworkers. We test our predictions across four studies (N = 1240)—one cross-sectional study, two time-lagged studies, and a preregistered experiment. The results provide support for our theoretical model, offering novel insights into some of the inadvertent consequences employees experience when they perceive frequent expressions of victimization by others at work.
