Although organizational justice scholars often describe unfairness as an emotionally laden experience, the role of emotion is underresearched. In a study of individuals who experienced being laid off (N = 173), the authors found that outcome favorability interacts with both procedural and interactional justice to predict participants' emotions. The pattern of interaction differed for inward-focused (i.e., shame and guilt) and outward-focused (i.e., anger and hostility) negative emotions. Attributions of blame mediated the relationship between fairness perceptions and outward-focused negative emotion. Outward-focused emotion mediated the relationship between fairness perceptions and retaliation.

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As empirical research exploring the relationship between justice and emotion has accumulated, there have been key questions that have remained unanswered and theoretical inconsistencies that have emerged. In this article, the authors address several of these gaps, including whether overall justice relates to both positive and negative emotions and whether both sets of emotions mediate the relationship between overall justice and behavioral outcomes. They also reconcile theoretical inconsistencies related to the differential effects of positive and negative emotions on behavioral outcomes (i.e., performance, withdrawal, and helping). Across two field studies (Study 1 is a cross-sectional study with multirater data, N = 136; Study 2 is a longitudinal study, N = 451), positive emotions consistently mediated the relationship between overall justice and approach-related behaviors (i.e., performance and helping), whereas negative emotions consistently mediated the relationship between overall justice and avoidance-related behaviors (i.e., withdrawal). Mixed results were found for negative emotions and approach-related behaviors (i.e., performance and helping), which indicated the importance of considering context, time, and target of the behavior. The authors discuss the theoretical implications for the asymmetric and broaden-and-build theories of emotion as well as the importance of simultaneously examining both positive and negative emotions.

Clinical and health psychology research has shown that expressive writing interventions-expressing one's experience through writing-can have physical and psychological benefits for individuals dealing with traumatic experiences. In the present study, the authors examined whether these benefits generalize to experiences of workplace injustice. Participants (N = 100) were randomly assigned to write on 4 consecutive days about (a) their emotions, (b) their thoughts, (c) both their emotions and their thoughts surrounding an injustice, or (d) a trivial topic (control). Post-intervention, participants in the emotions and thoughts condition reported higher psychological well-being, fewer intentions to retaliate, and higher levels of personal resolution than did participants in the other conditions. Participants in the emotions and thoughts condition also reported less anger than did participants who wrote only about their emotions.

How do individuals form fairness perceptions? This question has been central to the fairness literature since its inception, sparking a plethora of theories and a burgeoning volume of research. To date, the answer to this question has been predicated on the assumption that fairness perceptions are subjective (i.e., "in the eye of the beholder"). This assumption is shared with motivated cognition approaches, which highlight the subjective nature of perceptions and the importance of viewing individuals arriving at those perceptions as active and motivated processors of information. Further, the motivated cognition literature has other key insights that have been less explicitly paralleled in the fairness literature, including how different goals (e.g., accuracy, directional) can influence how individuals process information and arrive at their perceptions. In this integrative conceptual review, we demonstrate how interpreting extant theory and research related to the formation of fairness perceptions through the lens of motivated cognition can deepen our understanding of fairness, including how individuals' goals and motivations can influence their subjective perceptions of fairness. We show how this approach can provide integration as well as generate new insights into fairness processes. We conclude by highlighting the implications that applying a motivated cognition perspective can have for the fairness literature and by providing a research agenda to guide the literature moving forward. (PsycINFO Database Record