Retaliation in the workplace: The roles of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice.

The authors investigated the relationship between organizational justice and organizational retaliation behavior—adverse reactions to perceived unfairness by disgruntled employees toward their employer—in a sample of 240 manufacturing employees. Distributive, procedural, and interactional justice interacted to predict organizational retaliation behavior. A relation between distributive justice and retaliation was found only when there was low interactional and procedural justice. The 2-way interaction of distributive and procedural justice was observed only at a low level of interactional justice, and the 2-way interaction of distributive and interactional justice was observed only at a low level of procedural justice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of procedural and distributive justice on reactions to a selection system.

Procedural and distributive justice were examined in an employee selection situation. Along procedural justice dimensions, job relatedness of and explanation offered for the selection procedures were manipulated. Distributive justice was examined through manipulation of a selection decision and collection of a priori hiring expectations. Dependent measures included fairness reactions, recommendation intentions, self-efficacy, and actual work performance. Undergraduates (n?=?260) were selected/rejected for paid employment. Job relatedness influenced performance and interacted with selection decision on perceptions of distributive fairness and self-efficacy. Explanations influenced recommendations of rejected applicants. Interactions between hiring expectations and selection decision were observed on perceived fairness and recommendation intentions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Survivor reactions to reorganization: Antecedents and consequences of procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice.

This study tested a model of survivor reactions to reorganization, which incorporated multiple predictors and consequences of procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice. The 3 justice types had different correlates: all 4 antecedents (employee input, victim support, implementation, and communication quality) predicted interpersonal fairness, implementation and communication quality were associated with informational fairness, and employee input was the sole predictor of procedural justice. Procedural justice was strongly related to all 4 outcome variables, and interpersonal and informational justice added unique variance to the prediction of trust in management. The reorganization effort was still predictive of employee outcomes, although primarily through procedural justice approximately 1 year after its completion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Education and distributive justice: Some reflections on grading systems.

Begins with the unusual assumption that it may be possible to allocate merit, and then raises the question of how merit shall be distributed (i.e., Who merits an increase in merit?). This question is the basis for a discussion of distributive justice in education which focuses on the distribution of symbols of educational merit—grades. The article discusses the social function of the artificially created shortage of high marks and considers different characteristics of grading systems. The effects of cooperative and competitive distributive systems are summarized. The article concludes with the question: If the competitive-hierarchical atmosphere (induced by the competitive distribution system used wih respect to grades in the classroom) is not good for our children, is it good for us? (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's distributive justice reasoning: A standardized and objective scale.

A paired-comparisons measure of distributive justice development (DJS) was developed and validated in 3 studies. In Exp I, 104 children from kindergarten and 2nd and 4th grades were given the DJS and 2 Piagetian logical reasoning tasks. Age trends and a relation with logical reasoning were found. In Exp II, 66 1st, 3rd, and 5th graders were given the DJS and a measure of verbal ability. Age trends and a low relation with verbal ability were found. In Exp III, 88 1st, 3rd, and 5th graders from Kinshasa, Zaire, were given the DJS. The trends replicated those found in Exp II. Implications for distributive justice research are drawn. (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conditions leading to value-expressive effects in judgments of procedural justice: A test of four models.

Previous research has suggested that persons affected by the decisions made by third parties evaluate the decision-making process more favorably if they have an opportunity to state their case before decisions are made. This process control effect has been found to have a value-expressive component and, as a result, occurs even when the parties involved have little or no control over decisions. Two studies are reported that examine the value-expressive component of process control effects in the context of citizen experiences with the police and the courts. The first study considers the conditions under which value-expressive voice effects occur. It finds that a key precondition for such effects is an individual's belief that the authorities involved have considered his or her views. The second study uses panel data to examine the influence of an individual's prior views about the authorities encountered on his or her interpretation of experience. The results suggest that those with positive prior views are more likely to interpret low-decision-control situations in a way that is sympathetic to the authorities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Arbitration and distributive justice: Equity or equality?

Conflict over criteria used to allocate scarce resources is widespread in organizations. Two frequently used criteria (especially in labor–management disputes) are equity and equality. The conditions under which these two criteria are likely to be used by arbitrators were examined by investigating the effect of final offer (FOA) and conventional arbitration (CA) on the decisions and attitudes of 132 graduate and undergraduate students who acted as arbitrators in a series of wage and salary disputes between universities and their faculty associations. Subjects in the CA condition made arbitration awards that were most consistent with an equality, that is, split-the-difference decision rule (p?p?     

Procedural context and culture: Variation in the antecedents of procedural justice judgments.

T. R. Tyler and E. A. Lind (1992) identified 3 relational variables that make authoritative procedures seem fair: indications of status recognition, trust in benevolence, and neutrality in decision making. In Study 1, students from the United States, Germany, and Hong Kong recalled a conflict and reported their reactions. In Study 2, U.S. and Japanese students rated 3rd-party and dyadic procedures as ways of resolving a hypothetical dispute. In both studies, trust in benevolence correlated more strongly with procedural justice judgments in 3rd-party procedures. Study 2 showed stronger links between status recognition and procedural justice in the U.S. sample. In both studies, the relational variables appeared to mediate the effects of voice on procedural justice judgments. The results suggest that the basic processes posited in the theory generalize to dyadic conflict situations and across cultural contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The psychology of procedural justice: A test of the group-value model.

Research on the psychology of procedural justice has been dominated by Thibaut and Walker's (1975) theory about the psychology of procedural preference. That theory suggests that people are concerned with their direct and indirect control over decisions. Lind and Tyler (1988) proposed a group-value theory that suggests that several noncontrol issues—the neutrality of the decision-making procedure, trust in the 3rd party, and the information the experience communicates about social standing—influence both procedural preferences and judgments of procedural justice. This study examines 3 issues. The first is whether judgments about neutrality, trust, and social standing have an independent impact on judgments of procedural justice. The results suggest that they do. The second is how Thibaut and Walker's control theory developed. The results suggest that control issues are central to the setting studied by Thibaut and Walker—disputes—but are less important in other situations. Finally, the implications of these findings for a group-value theory of procedural justice are examined. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Procedural justice and status: Status salience as antecedent of procedural fairness effects.

The current article explores status as an antecedent of procedural fairness effects (the findings that perceived procedural fairness affects people's reactions, e.g., their relational judgments). On the basis of the literature, the authors proposed that salience of the general concept of status leads people to be more attentive to procedural fairness information and that, as a consequence, stronger procedural fairness effects should be found. In correspondence with this hypothesis, Experiment 1 showed stronger procedural fairness effects on people's relational treatment evaluations in a status salient condition compared with a control condition. Experiment 2 replicated this effect and, in further correspondence with the hypothesis, showed that status salience led to increased cognitive accessibility of fairness concerns. Implications for the psychology of procedural justice are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distributive justice, procedural justice, and psychological distress: The moderating effect of coworker support and work autonomy.

Recent research has demonstrated that the perception of injustice at work may increase psychological health-related problems. The purpose of this study is to examine the moderating effect of coworker support and work autonomy on the relationships between both distributive and procedural justice and psychological distress. Results, on the basis of responses to questionnaires given to 248 prison employees, show that coworker support moderates the relationships between both forms of justice and psychological distress. Specifically, these relationships are weakened when employees benefit from a high level of coworker support. Furthermore, work autonomy moderates the relationship between procedural justice and psychological distress but not the relationship between distributive justice and psychological distress. Thus, procedural injustice is less likely to increase psychological distress when the level of work autonomy is high. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The justice motive in social behavior.

Reviews the book, The Justice Motive in Social Behavior, edited by Melvin J. Lerner and Sally C. Lerner (1981). This edited book is the result of a conference held at the University of Waterloo. Here (September 1978) an interdisciplinary group of experts sought answers to the question, "How can the human concern with justice provide opportunities for constructive responses to future social dilemmas which may involve scarcity of resources and rapid change?" The 20 chapters are directly or indirectly related to this question, and the book is extremely timely and thought-provoking. This is an important book and should be a welcome addition to anyone interested in the implications for justice in the not-too-distant scarcity-laden future. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of computer surveillance on perceptions of privacy and procedural justice.

Electronic workplace surveillance is raising concerns about privacy and fairness. Integrating research on electronic performance monitoring, procedural justice, and organizational privacy, the author proposes a framework for understanding reactions to technologies used to monitor and control employees. To test the framework's plausibility, temporary workers performed computer/Web-based tasks under varying levels of computer surveillance. Results indicated that monitoring job-relevant activities (relevance) and affording those who were monitored input into the process (participation) reduced invasion of privacy and enhanced procedural justice. Moreover, invasion of privacy fully mediated the effect of relevance and partially mediated the effect of participation on procedural justice. The findings are encouraging for integrating theory and research on procedural justice and organizational privacy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Voice, control, and procedural justice: Instrumental and noninstrumental concerns in fairness judgments.

179 undergraduates took part in a study of the effects of instrumental and noninstrumental participation on distributive and procedural fairness judgments. In a goal-setting procedure, Ss were allowed voice before the goal was set, after the goal was set, or not at all. Ss received information relevant to the task, irrelevant information, or no information. Both pre- and postdecision voice led to higher fairness judgments than no voice, with predecision voice leading to higher fairness judgments than postdecision voice. Relevant information also increased perceived fairness. Mediation analyses showed that perceptions of control account for some, but not all, of the voice-based enhancement of procedural justice. Results show that both instrumental and noninstrumental concerns are involved in choice effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comparing three processes underlying judgments of procedural justice: A field study of mediation and arbitration.

A natural setting in which 158 coal miners who had filed grievances were assigned to either mediation or arbitration was used to test a model of 3 mediating processes underlying judgments of procedural justice: instrumental, noninstrumental, and procedural enactment. The generality of these processes was tested across procedures varying objectively in the degree of disputants' outcome control, across contexts in which disputes rather than decisions were resolved, and across situations in which the grievance was won, lost, or compromised as a result of the dispute resolution procedure. All 3 processes consistently accounted for judgments of procedural justice in all but 1 of these circumstances (instrumental processes did not account for procedural justice when grievants won). Perceptions of the 3rd party's enactment of the procedure emerged in this study as a key influence (as a moderator and mediator) of procedural justice judgments. Implications for the theory of procedural justice and the design of dispute resolution procedures are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-image versus impressional management in adherence to distributive justice standards: The influence of self-awareness and self-consciousness.

In Exp I (88 undergraduates), a paradigm was developed to examine how Ss responded to conflicts arising from attempts to make favorable impressions on themselves and others by making decisions about the division of a reward. It was found that divergent self-presentational concerns conflicted when Ss who were made self-aware allocated reward to competing workers while anticipating interaction with the low-input recipient. Exp II, with 112 high and low self-conscious Ss (determined by the Self-Consciousness Scale), found that resolution of conflict was influenced by the combined impact of manipulations of self-awareness and dispositional differences in self-consciousness. High private-self-conscious Ss who were made self-aware distributed reward in accordance with the personally salient equity standard; high public-self-conscious Ss who were not made self-aware attempted to make a favorable impression on the low-input recipient by dividing the pay equally. The salience of intrapersonal and social standards as vehicles of self-presentation is discussed with respect to their implications for distributive justice. (49 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive bias in procedural justice: Formation and implications of illusory correlations in perceived intergroup fairness.

Illusory correlations in procedural justice were investigated in 2 experiments. After receiving information describing the fair and unfair treatment of 2 groups' members by police, participants judged the fairness of each group's treatment. Illusory correlations formed in both experiments, resulting in erroneous associations between the smaller group and the infrequent type of treatment. In Experiment 2, participants made harsher guilt judgments of members of the group perceived as receiving relatively favorable treatment. Mediational evidence suggests that differences in guilt judgments reflected attempts to compensate for perceived injustice, creating real differences in group treatment. The benefit of incorporating cognitive biases in models of procedural justice is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Identifying a missing link between participation and satisfaction: The mediating role of procedural justice perceptions.

This study examined the mediating role of procedural justice in the relationship between participation and satisfaction. The study design used 3 possible goal-setting methods—assigned, self-set, and participative. A total of 235 undergraduate students participated in 3 trials of a class scheduling task. Structural equation modeling of the predicted model showed that perceived participation affected satisfaction through effects on the perceived fairness of participation in decision-making procedures. Tests of an alternative model further supported the hypothesized relationship. The results suggested that perceived justice may be responsible, at least in part, for participation effects on satisfaction and may provide an explanation for inconsistencies in prior participation studies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Organization structure as a moderator of the relationship between procedural justice, interactional justice, perceived organizational support, and supervisory trust.

Organizational justice researchers recognize the important role organization context plays in justice perceptions, yet few studies systematically examine contextual variables. This article examines how 1 aspect of context--organizational structure--affects the relationship between justice perceptions and 2 types of social exchange relationships, organizational and supervisory. The authors suggest that under different structural conditions, procedural and interactional justice will play differentially important roles in determining the quality of organizational social exchange (as evidenced by perceived organizational support [POS]) and supervisory social exchange (as evidenced by supervisory trust). In particular, the authors hypothesized that the relationship between procedural justice and POS would be stronger in mechanistic organizations and that the relationship between interactional justice and supervisory trust would be stronger in organic organizations. The authors' results support these hypotheses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)