How do people judge fairness in supervisor and peer relationships? Another assessment of the dimensions of justice

Abstract

The ultimate goal of organizational justice research is to help create fairer workplaces. This goal may have been slowed by an inattention to the criteria that workers themselves use to ascertain what they believe is fair. Referred to as ‘justice rules’, these were originally determined by theoretical considerations and organized in four dimensions (distributive, procedural, interpersonal and informational justice). There have been few attempts to investigate how far these classical norms represent fairness experiences and concerns in modern workplaces, especially in the context of working with peers. In a person-centric study, we investigate which rules people use when judging the fairness of interactions with supervisors and peers. This allows us to identify 14 new justice rules that are not taken into account by traditional measures. When subjected to factor analysis in follow-up studies, the enlarged set of rules suggests a more parsimonious structure for organizational justice, with only three dimensions apiece for supervisor and peer justice. We term these factors relationship, task, and distributive justice. Furthermore, we find that the resulting model of justice rules is a good predictor of attitudes in relation to supervisors and peers and can provide additional insights into how to understand and manage justice.

Seeking and finding justice: Why and when managers' feedback seeking enhances justice enactment

“…This focus aligns with arguments by Törnblom and Kazemi (2015) that research on distributive justice has focused excessively on economic resources, even though the construct encompasses other resources, including praise. It also aligns with Fortin et al (2019), who found that praise is evaluated as part of distributive justice.…”

“…Fairness involves both subjectivity (Barclay, Bashshur, & Fortin, 2017; Primeaux, Karri, & Caldwell, 2013) and individual preferences (German, Fortin, & Read, 2016). As a result, justice enactment that adheres to objective “rules” but that insufficiently incorporates contextual information may not be perceived as fair by employees because it may not meet their specific needs and preferences (Fortin, Cropanzano, Cugueró‐Escofet, Nadisic, & Van Wagoner, 2019). For instance, managers may verbally acknowledge an employee's contribution during a team meeting, whereas this person may have been expecting more tangible recognition (Gibson, O'Leary, & Weintraub, 2020).…”

“…One factor with an eigenvalue significantly higher than 1 (2.888) explained 48% of the variance. Given this finding and in line with recommendations (Colquitt & Rodell, 2015) and the common practice of combining items from several justice facets into an overall justice measure when no a priori theorizing exists as to the distinct possible effects of predictors on each of the facets (e.g., Koopman, Lin, Lennard, Matta, & Johnson, 2019), we created one procedural and informational justice‐enactment variable by averaging all six items ( α = .78) (see also Fortin et al, 2019).…”

The Relative Role of the Intellectual and Moral Virtues in Sustainable Management Decisions: The Case of Practical Wisdom and Justice

“…Therefore, it is not impossible to improve wisdom at this point, but it becomes more challenging when unjust consequences have been generated and managers first need to correct injustices before choosing the right objectives, which they have previously failed to do [63]. Additional justice dimensions are more difficult to promote, and injustice can therefore easily increase over time [30]. We thus propose the following propositions: Proposition 5.…”

The Relative Role of the Intellectual and Moral Virtues in Sustainable Management Decisions: The Case of Practical Wisdom and Justice

“…Measured this way, injustice has been considered a predictor of many counterproductive behaviors [28], and from a managerial perspective, some research shows that the need to manage justice perceptions is part of the managerial endeavor [29]. Recent work has added additional dimensions to justice perceptions, like empathy, for instance, or having considerations about personal circumstances [30]. Besides, recent models in Sustainable Human Resource Management have considered organizational justice as one of the main variables explaining knowledgesharing behaviors in organizations [31].…”