Delivering bad news fairly: Higher construal level promotes interactional justice enactment through perspective taking

Abstract

Summary How can managers deliver bad news with greater interactional justice? We propose a novel cognitive pathway: Construing the activity at a higher (vs. lower) level increases actors' other‐oriented perspective taking, which in turn promotes the enactment of interactional justice. Three studies provide support. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated a beneficial effect of construal level on interactional justice enactment when explaining a hypothetical bad news decision. Study 2 also showed that other‐oriented perspective taking is the mechanism through which construal level promotes interactional justice enactment. Study 3 replicated and extended these findings with a different paradigm and the addition of a moderator variable (trait perspective taking), providing a converging test of the proposed mechanism. Overall, the present research suggests that how managers think about delivering bad news—whether at higher or lower levels of construal—affects the extent to which they think from the recipient's perspective, and in turn how they communicate the news. Our research generates novel avenues for future research on justice enactment, construal level theory, and perspective taking. It may also have implications for better understanding downstream consequences of interactional justice enactment for bad news deliverers themselves.

Uncharted waters of justice enactment—Venturing into the social complexity of doing justice in organizations

“…The cognitive framing or construction of circumstances can, at a higher level of construal, promote a Kantian deontic, rule‐adhering response (Eyal & Liberman, 2012) or, at a lower level of construal, provide opportunities for motivated attributions or moral disengagement (van Houwelingen et al, 2021). Interestingly, high construal levels do not preclude deliberate information processing, as Holt and colleagues (2021) point out. In their paper, high construal levels facilitate perspective taking and, consequently, fairer processes and interactions.…”

“…In this vein, van Houwelingen and colleagues (2021) found that justice agents can be more lenient on transgressors whose activities benefitted the justice agent but that this bias is counteracted when the situation is construed at a high level, because low‐level construal provides opportunities to exploit contextual information as mitigating factors. From a similar information processing perspective, Holt and colleagues (2021) demonstrate that construing the situation at a higher rather than lower level broadens managers' mental horizon and promotes perspective taking that is then integrated into justice deliberations.…”

“…Of the impressive pool of submissions, the seven papers accepted into this Special Issue address justice enactment from diverse and novel yet complementary perspectives. Two of the papers focus on cognitive foundations of justice enactment and specifically on how construal level influences the delivery of bad news (Holt, Bobocel, & Chen, 2021) and punishment of misconduct (van Houwelingen, van Dijke, van Hiel, & de Cremer, 2021). Two other papers highlight justice enactment as a joint process between managers and employees; one highlighting the role of upward feedback (Sherf, Gajendran, & Posner, 2021) and one the role of managers' gender in how their overall fairness is judged by employees (Varty, Barclay, & Brady, 2021).…”

“…In the first paper, Holt et al (2021) investigate the relation between construal level, perspective taking, and justice enactment. By combining contributions from three literatures (interactional justice, perspective taking, and construal level theory; for the latter, see Trope & Liberman, 2010), the authors suggest a new cognitive pathway to promote managers' enactment of interactional justice.…”

Current directions in organizational justice.

“…Of course, being inclined to be fair by disposition or even being motivated to be fair is not enough—managers must possess the self-regulatory capacity to engage in justice actions and be aware of their justice behaviors (Whiteside & Barclay, 2016). They must also have the cognitive capacity to take the perspective of the justice recipient (Holt et al, 2021). Context also matters; for example, Sherf et al (2019) demonstrated that when managers have a high workload, justice actions are deprioritized unless the organization explicitly rewards these actions.…”