Is shooting for fairness always beneficial? The influence of promotion fairness on employees' cognitive and emotional reactions to promotion failure

Abstract

Promotions, as a part of organizational incentive and reward systems, can motivate employees to perform well and to increase commitment to their firms. But very little is known about why and when promotion failure influences employees' subsequent responses. Integrating social‐cognitive theory and the cognitive appraisal theory of emotion in justice literature, we investigated the effect of promotion failure on employees' work engagement through cognitive and emotional processes and the moderating effects of perceived promotion fairness. Employing two survey studies (Study 1 and Study 2) and an experimental study (Study 3), we found that: (1) promotion failure was negatively related to self‐efficacy and positively associated with anger; (2) promotion failure was negatively related to work engagement through reduced self‐efficacy and elevated anger; (3) promotion perceived to be fair amplified the negative effect of promotion failure on employee self‐efficacy but mitigated its influence on anger; (4) promotion fairness perception strengthened the indirect negative relationship between promotion failure and work engagement through self‐efficacy but weakened this indirect relationship via anger. Our work contributes to promotion and justice literature and enlightens practitioners about how to manage promotion practice.

Internal Mobility: A Review and Agenda for Future Research

“…Although these findings both mirror and contribute to research on diversity (e.g., Van Dijk, Meyer, Van Engen, & Loyd, 2017), given that promotions are often dependent on manager recommendations, these results raise questions about how organizations can create more equitable opportunities for promotion. Given that who is promoted can have ripple effects by sending signals about fairness (e.g., Zhu, Chen, Wang, Jiao, & Yang, 2022), improving equity in promotion decisions is crucial. Additionally, although significant research has been done on the relationship between gender and promotions, there has been comparatively less literature on other demographic attributes.…”

“…Denied promotions can increase an individual's desire to leave (Foley, Kidder, & Powell, 2002) due to perceptions of inequity (Schwarzwald, Koslowsky, & Shalit, 1992), reduced confidence in advancement opportunities (Foley et al, 2002), and unmet expectations (Schaubroeck & Lam, 2004). However, rejected employees are less likely to turnover when the rejection is viewed as fair (Zhu et al, 2022), if they can craft growth-based narratives (Vough, 2017) and when they are interviewed by the hiring manager and lose to other internal applicants (Dlugos & Keller, 2021). This suggests that the negative effects of denied promotions may be partially dependent on how rejected employees interpret them.…”

From opportunity to threat: the non‐linear relationship between voice frequency and job performance via voice endorsement

“…2 We added a study to provide more evidence to our argument that individuals with high perceived task interdependence are more likely to raise issues that require more resources to enact. Specifically, we recruited 200 employees on the Credamo platform (a platform in China similar to MTurk) that has been demonstrated to provide reliable samples and good validity from previous studies (Wang et al 2022;Zhu et al 2022). The participants were working in different categories of companies, such as private enterprises (38.5%), state-owned companies (26.0%) and government-affiliated institutions (3.5%).…”

“…2022; Zhu et al. 2022). The participants were working in different categories of companies, such as private enterprises (38.5%), state‐owned companies (26.0%) and government‐affiliated institutions (3.5%).…”

I cannot miss it! The influence of supervisor bottom-line mentality on employee presenteeism

“…Furthermore, we also identify status-striving motivation (SSM) as a relevant first-stage moderator. The cognitive appraisal theory suggests that personal characteristics can impact an individual’s emotional and behavioral responses to workplace stressors (Lazarus, 1991) and studies confirm that there are individual differences in employees’ cognitive evaluations of stressors (Zhu et al. , 2022).…”