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

Abstract

Summary There is growing recognition that justice enactment is a complex activity and that managers face significant contextual and situational roadblocks when attempting to enact justice. However, research has not fully examined how managers, in the course of their jobs, can (a) identify and respond to justice‐related issues and (b) assemble and synthesize relevant information required to act in a manner consistent with justice rules. To begin addressing these concerns, we posit feedback seeking as a key managerial behavior that can facilitate greater justice enactment because it promotes the flow of both solicited and unsolicited information from employees to managers. Such information flows enhance the saliency of fairness goals and allow managers to learn about employees' contextualized needs in ways that facilitate increased justice enactment. However, we argue that these effects are less likely to occur when feedback‐seeking managers have lower generalized self‐efficacy. An analysis of archival data (NManagers = 8,706, NEmployees = 40,830), a study with manager–employee dyads (N = 181), and a time‐separated study of managers (N = 196) provide preliminary evidence in line with these arguments. We discuss the implications of our theory and findings with respect to the justice and feedback‐seeking literature.

Transformational Leadership across Cultures: Follower Perception and Satisfaction

“…They create community by recognizing both group accomplishments, and individual contributions to the team's success. Taken together, the specific behaviors reflected in these five practices help leaders to motivate and inspire followers toward cooperation (Kouzes and Posner 2017), and have been used extensively in prior research (e.g., Burkman et al 2019;Caza and Posner 2019;Hage and Posner 2015;Kouzes and Posner 2019;Sherf et al 2020).…”

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

“…First, justice agents may inadvertently be unfair because of informational asymmetry, which may make them simply unaware of the impact and interpretation of their decisions and behavior. Sherf and colleagues (2021) discuss the complexity of justice judgments and enactment, in particular the need to “assemble and synthesize relevant information required to act in a manner consistent with justice rules.” Feedback seeking, as Sherf and colleagues (2021) demonstrate, is thus an important practice in the justice enactment process.…”

“…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). Two further papers lead us to consider the issue of power in the context of justice enactment.…”

“…In the third paper, Sherf et al (2021) examine the possibility that employees play a role in enabling managers' justice enactment. Drawing on an analysis of archival data, a study with manager–employee dyads, and a longitudinal survey study of managers, the overall results show that feedback‐seeking as a proactive managerial behavior facilitates justice enactment by stimulating learning about employee needs and preferences and increasing the salience of fairness goals.…”

What helps managers being fair? Predicting managers’ self-reported justice enactment during pay setting using the ability-motivation-opportunity framework

“…Self-efficacy involves the perceived belief that one is capable of a specific behavior (Williams, 2010) and has been associated with greater effort, engagement, and performance (Avolio & Hannah, 2008;Judge & Bono, 2001). A recent study showed that managers with higher levels of self-efficacy in their job reported that they enacted more distributive, procedural, and informational justice towards their employees than those managers who reported less self-efficacy (Sherf et al, 2020).…”