Justice in the Workplace

From theory To Practice, Volume 2

Russell Cropanzano, Russell Cropanzano

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135683849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Justice in the Workplace acts as a central reference point for application of organizational justice and helps human resource managers relate the importance of justice to their work environments. Forming much of this book's content, outcomes, processes, and interpersonal treatment are three powerful tools for building and maintaining workplace justice. In Part I these books are discussed at a theoretical level. Part II applies these theories to several issues important to both human resource management and society. And Part III looks at organizational justice in the years ahead. Compared to the first volume, this book will appeal to practitioners and researchers in such applied areas as human resource management, industrial organizational psychology, and management.

I

Theoretical Advances and New Conceptual Directions

1

The History of Organizational Justice: The Founders Speak

Zinta S. Byrne

Russell Cropanzano

Colorado State University

This is a book about organizational justice. In the pages that follow we examine the current theoretical state of the field (chaps. 2 and 3), an assortment of practical applications of these theories (chaps. 4-7), and then we take an aspiring look into the future (chaps. 8-10). In this chapter the goals are simple and modest. We examine the past; beginning in the late 1970s and gaining considerable velocity in the 1980s, justice research roared through the social sciences. Not only were new theoretical positions proposed, debated, and reconstructed (for a sampling see Bies, 1987; Bies & Moag, 1986; Brockner & Wiesenfeld, 1996; Cropanzano & Folger, 1991; Folger, 1986; Greenberg, 1987a; Lind, 1995; Van den Bos, Lind, & Wilke, chap. 3, this volume), but few organizational practices escaped scrutiny from the lens of organizational justice. Such technical practices as performance evaluation (Folger, Konovsky, & Cropanzano, 1992), staffing (Gilliland, 1993; Gilliland & Steiner, chap. 8, this volume), strategic planning (Korsgaard, Sapienza, & Schweiger, chap. 10, this volume), pay systems (Alexander & Sinclair, 1995; Miceli, 1993), and downsizing (Folger & Skarlicki, chap. 5, this volume; Konovsky & Brockner, 1993) were reinvestigated under the magnifying glass of the justice paradigm. The result was an outpouring of new scholarship that continues today, highlighted by the appearance of several books (e.g., Cropanzano, 1993; Cropanzano & Kacmar, 1995; Folger & Cropanzano, 1998; Greenberg, 1996; Greenberg & Cropanzano, in press; Lind & Tyler, 1988; Sheppard, Lewicki, & Minton, 1993) and numerous review articles (e.g., Brockner & Wiesenfeld, 1996; Cropanzano & Folger, 1991; Cropanzano & Greenberg, 1997; Folger & Greenberg, 1985; Greenberg, 1990a, 1990b).

From all this attention it is easy to forget that organizational justice research is less than 15 years old. In fact, the very term organizational justice was only coined in 1987 by Greenberg in his Academy of Management Review paper (Greenberg, 1987a). Likewise, the chapter that is often credited with igniting this storm of interest, “Procedural Justice: An Interpretive Analysis of Personnel Systems,” was published in 1985 by Folger and Greenberg. As shown, the emergence of organizational justice as a distinct area of psychological inquiry, as well as its explosive rise to prominence, was largely due to the aggregate efforts of five seminal researchers: Robert Bies, Robert Folger, Jerald Greenberg, Allan Lind, and Tom Tyler. To assist in the preparation of this manuscript, all five of these scholars consented to being interviewed by the senior author. The interviews took place by telephone in November of 1997. Although some specific questions were prepared in advance, the interviews were generally open-ended and accommodated a flexible structure allowing each interviewee to explore whatever issues he deemed important. This chapter is the result.

What is Organizational Justice?

At its most general level, organizational justice is an area of psychological inquiry that focuses on perceptions of fairness in the workplace. It is the psychology of justice applied to organizational settings (Lind & Tyler, 1988; Sheppard et al., 1992). In the beginning, organizational justice researchers borrowed heavily from existing social-psychological research on fairness. Bies echoed this in his interview, “justice originally came out of social psychology.” In fact, Folger, Lind, and Tyler all received their original training in social psychology. Much, although by no means all, of the early social-psychology research was based on laboratory simulations (e.g., Folger, 1977), or surveys in legal environments (e.g., Tyler, 1984), although some important workplace studies were also conducted (Adams, 1965; Homans, 1965). In any case, although social-psychology research provided a useful tool for understanding work organizations, “borrowing” was not straightforward as we discuss in the next section. In the process of transforming social-psychological justice into organizational justice the new conceptual frameworks developed their own distinct stamp, hence shedding their borrowed look.

Defining organizational justice as the study of fairness perceptions at work is useful in that it captures the eclectic nature of justice as a research area. Organizational justice researchers have reached nearly universal consensus that fairness can plausibly be divided into at least two types (although other frameworks may also be reasonable; see Bies, in press; Greenberg, 1993). Distributive justice, or, the fairness of the outcomes received in a given transaction, is considered the first type. The second type is procedural justice, or, the fairness of the process that leads to those outcomes. These two types of justice are discussed later in this chapter and throughout this book. However, we should first examine the relation of distributive and procedural fairness to the colloquial definition of organizational justice.

From the start, organizational justice researchers have explicitly noted that both types of fairness are important. For example, Leventhal (1976a; 1976b; Leventhal, Karuza, & Fry, 1980) emphasized procedural fairness as well as distributive, recognizing that previous justice literature failed to acknowledge the importance of procedures in fair decisions. Additionally, Alexander and Ruderman (1987) examined both distributive and procedural justice in a study of federal government employees. Likewise, when Greenberg (1987a) coined the term organizational justice, he did so in the context of an article that reviewed both the distributive and procedural literature. Nevertheless, it is also true that organizational justice research has historically embodied more of a process-oriented flavor. This can be demonstrated by examining the titles of some of the seminal works in organizational justice. For example, Folger and Greenberg (1985) was titled Procedural Justice: An Interpretative Analysis of Personnel Systems. Likewise, an influential (and somewhat social psychological) book by Lind and Tyler (1988) was called The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice. Additionally, in two reviews of the organizational justice literature the authors devoted more space to procedural justice than distributive and claimed to do so because the literature on procedural justice was the larger of the two (Cropanzano & Greenberg, 1997; Greenberg, 1990a). Importantly, this procedural flavor should not be taken to suggest that distributive justice is unimportant to organizational justice researchers. As Greenberg so eloquently stated in his interview, “to study only one justice is like looking at only the left brain. When you study the entire brain, you can’t ignore one half.” Our only claim is that the more recent and current organizational justice research tends to emphasize the procedural aspects more than the distributive.

When these observations are considered, they complement the earlier definition of organizational justice. It is not simply the study of fairness perceptions at work; rather, it is the study of fairness perceptions given a particular paradigm with a certain emphasis. In particular, the character of organizational justice research owes its current shape to what Bies and Folger suggested in their interviews, “the influence of socio-political, cognitive, and legal sciences,” while retaining its social psychological and procedural roots. It seems logical, at this point, to take a step back and first examine where organizational justice originated and then examine how it was shaped.

The Origins of Organizational Justice

Although the history of organizational justice is short, it is also storied. A rich history of events have occurred in the short span of 20 years. During his interview, Tyler suggested that organizational justice research unfolded in at least three waves. These waves are also referred to in a recent book (Tyler, Boeckmann, Smith, & Huo, 1997). We use Tyler’s ideas to structure this historical account. The first wave saw the rise of relative deprivation research. The second wave saw the coming of a distributive justice emphasis. And the third wave was dominated by the emergence of procedural justice.

First Wave: Relative Deprivation

It was Joanne Martin, who was focused on relative deprivation, that offered me a revolutionary and radically different perspective for analyzing justice issues which had a big influence on me, “recalled Bies during his interview. While referring to the base which relative deprivation research established Folger explained, “early in my graduate studies, I read a paper which talked about relative deprivation. It was from this compelling literature that I got the name “referent” for my Referent Cognition Theory.

As demonstrated by these quotes, the interviews attested to the foundation provided by the relative deprivation (RD) tradition. However, to understand why relative deprivation research was so influential we have to take a closer look at what this research communicated. As discussed by Crosby (1976), the term relative deprivation has two meanings. First, it refers to negative feelings that can result when an individual compares his or her own state of affairs to a more advantageous alternative. Secondly, RD refers to various theories that articulate how these comparisons take place, as well as the consequences of such comparisons.

The early RD theories had something approximating the following form: (a) The individual receives or anticipates receiving some outcome; (b) the individual ascertains the worth of this outcome by comparing it to some standard, usually an outcome obtained by a similar other; (c) if the obtained outcome is less than the standard, the individual feels a sense of moral outrage or dissatisfaction (Pettigrew, 1967). Parenthetically, worth mentioning is that the moral outrage or dissatisfaction was more intense for important outcomes and less intense for unimportant outcomes (Bernstein & Crosby, 1980). The key insight of RD researchers was that the value of an outcome was not defined objectively. Rather, value could be understood in reference to some point of comparison (Crosby, 1984; Kulik & Ambrose, 1992). For example, in RD research discussed by Martin (1981), when female managers compared themselves to their male counterparts in similar jobs they experienced a sense of pay inequity. However, when the same female managers compared themselves to other women in lower paying jobs, they felt more pay equity. For this reason similar pay rates engender more or less outrage, depending on the referent point.

Contemporary organizational justice research tends not to explicitly use RD theory. Nevertheless, the interviews provided substantial evidence of its influence. It is also noteworthy, that Joanne Martin (e.g., Martin, 1981), a prominent RD scholar was the chair of Robert Bies’ doctoral committee. This provides a somewhat direct academic link between RD and current justice frameworks.

Other direct evidence exists as well. The earliest social-psychological application to workplace fairness, with which many justice researchers are now familiar, was an RD study by Stouflfer, Suchman, DeVinney, Star, and Williams (1949). Stouffer and his colleagues examined promotion satisfaction among World War II soldiers. Specifically, they compared the satisfaction between those in the Military Police, in which promotions were few, to those in the Army Air Corps, in which promotions were many. Stouffer et al. (1994) found that promotion satisfaction was actually higher for the slow-rising military police. This readily lends itself to an RD interpretation: The Military Police compared themselves to others in their units and decided they were relatively advantaged and treated fairly, even when they did not obtain a promotion. Within the Army Air Corps, on the other hand, individuals compared themselves to others in their units. Thus, they were relatively disadvantaged when they did not receive a promotion.

Another example of RD’s influence can be shown by examining Folger’s (1986) Referent Cognitions Theory (RCT), as mentioned earlier. Modern justice researchers generally think of RCT as a theory emphasizing procedural justice, and this is so (Cropanzano & Folger, 1991; Folger & Cropanzano, 1998). However, during its initial formulation, RCT was treated as a theory of Relative Deprivation (Folger, Rosenfield, Rheaume, & Martin, 1983). In fact, it explicitly attempted to address some of the weaknesses in an earlier RD model tested by Bernstein and Crosby (1984; Folger, Rosenfield, & Rheaume, 1983).

For all of its historic importance, however, RD had its limitations. Perhaps the biggest problem was that RD was as much a general idea as it was a well-articulated theoretical position. It contributed the idea that justice was understood in reference to some focal standard, but the family of RD theories tended to be so broad that they did not lend themselves to precise predictions. One could potentially defend any outcome by changing the presumed referent. Stated at this level of generality, RD was difficult to falsify. Consider the case of Stouffer et al.’s (1949) Military Police. Suppose they had reported less satisfaction than the Air Corps. In this hypothetical example, it could have been argued that the Military Police saw themselves as disadvantaged in reference to soldiers in other units. In other words, RD could have been invoked as a causal explanation regardless of the pattern of data.

Indeed, the RD model was so broad that some might wonder if it was really a theory of justice. In his interview, Tyler suggested that “relative deprivation was not justice research, although it was an inspiration for justice researchers.” This is an important point. As various scholars (e.g., Cropanzano & Greenberg, 1997; Tyler & Lind, 1992) noted a disadvantageous comparison may be unfortunate, but it is not necessarily unfair. An individual might be dissatisfied with his or her (relatively) low pay, but in and of itself this does not necessarily engender a sense of injustice (Van den Bos, Wilke, Lind, & Vermunt, 1998). Unfairness requires the violation of some moral or ethical standard, not simply giving one person less than another. As a result of these limitations, researchers began to revise their thinking about fairness.

Second Wave: Distributive Justice

According to Tyler, “Distributive justice was really the beginnings of organizational justice.” Distributive justice evaluates the fairness of outcome distributions (Deutsch, 1985). Folger, Greenberg, Lind, and Tyler all concurred that distributive justice in organizations can be traced as far back as 1965 when Stacy Adams proposed a theory of inequity, most commonly referred to as equity theory. As it turns out, Webster’s Thesaurus provides injustice and unfairness as synonyms for inequity, hence Adams was actually proposing a theory of injustice. “Stacy Adams’ Equity Theory was a major breakthrough in organizational justice research,” emphasized Lind during his interview. Adams was an extremely influential justice researcher. He was a direct influence on two of the justice researchers interviewed for this chapter. While on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Adams chaired Folger’s doctoral dissertation and served on the doctoral committee for Lind. Adams’ equity theory was among the first justice theories explicitly cultivated in the context of work organizations. For example, in one early study Adams and Rosenbaum (1962) hired undergraduate students to conduct market research interviews.

In constructing equity theory, Adams (1965) elaborated on the justice theories of Homans (1961). In particular, Adams proposed that individuals make cognitive evaluations of the difference between their contributions and the resultant outcomes (i.e., economic or social compensation), as compared to the difference of others’ input to outcomes ratio (Adams & Freedman, 1976). Folger explained, “Adams envisioned equity theory as an employer and employee exchange. Conceptually, the question is what am I getting in exchange for my labor. We use another coworker to judge the amount.” Adams believed that individuals go beyond a simple ranking system in their assessment of inputs and outputs, to where they precisely quantify the equity or inequity of ...