Organizational Justice and Organizational Change

Managing by Love

Dominique A. David

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000198508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Comportement organisationnel

Although various factors contribute to failed change, one of the key reasons for change failure is the inability of leaders to gain the trust of employees, to understand the interaction between their subordinates, and to convince them to support change and to commit the energy and effort necessary to implement it.

The aims of this book are to establish theories in order to describe and explain how human behaviors and contexts interact dynamically in these changes, and manage change and justice by reducing inequalities, giving emphasis to distributive justice. In addition, the aim of this book is also for readers to better understand employees' perceptions of organizational justice by senior management which is particularly important during the organizational change because change cannot succeed without the acceptance and support from employees. Organizational Justice and Organizational Change: Managing by Love provides readers a theoretical understanding and recommendations for acting properly in an organization, forming a comprehensive tool and better enable practitioners to achieve management of change and justice in organizations.

It will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of change management, organizational studies, leadership, and strategic management.

Part I

Problematic, Concepts and Context

1 Problematic

Problem Statement

Considering that it is crucial for developing theories allowing organizations to get practical outcomes during periods of change, scholars call for a more dynamic conceptualization of organizational justice (OJ) in the workplace, and a better understanding of perceptions of justice during organizational change (OC) processes. The problem is that despite the many theories, implementation strategies, and approaches, successful OC remains elusive, which may explain the poor success rate of change programs in general. Change initiatives are among the most important projects an organization can undertake as successful outcomes could bring competitive advantages, while failure could have catastrophic consequences.

Organizational scholars contend that employees will assume a positive approach to OC if they perceive their treatment by management and the organization as being fair. Most scholars argue that employees’ perceptions of trust and fairness impact the success of change initiatives, while others advocate more broadly that OJ is key to succeeding in any OC. Nevertheless, perceptions of justice like OJ or managers’ perceptions of justice (MPJ) depend on norms of justice, their interpretations, and the willingness to act according to rules that these norms suggest to people within contexts that change over time. Furthermore, due to the dynamics and complexity of social exchanges, some authors state that economics and management theories could profit from a clearer understanding of shared norms. Thus, an opportunity exists for investigating and documenting a deeper understanding of how and why perceptions of justice interact during change in organizations. Therefore, the rationale and foundational elements of this theoretical essay include the need for a new theoretical understanding allowing organizations to achieve practical outcomes during periods of change.

Questions

Aligning with the above Problem Statement, a central question (CQ) is developed: How are norms of justice, perceptions of these norms, and decisions related to these perceptions interwoven when people assess change and justice in organizations? Regarding the framework’s components of a research design (i.e., epistemology, theoretical perspective, methodology, and method), Creswell (2003) explained how three elements of inquiry (i.e., knowledge claims, strategies, and methods) combine to form different approaches to research, and help determine how to collect and analyze data. Thus, social constructivism combined with interpretivism and pragmatism define together the overall approach of this theoretical essay, which allows the researcher to be free to choose methods, techniques, and procedures of research that best meet their needs and purposes. Therefore, and in line with the CQ, two sub-research questions (SQs) are developed:

• SQ1: How can OJ be improved during OC?
• SQ2: How do contexts and behaviors interact while change takes place?

Purpose of the Essay

The purpose of this theoretical essay is twofold:

1. 1) First, to introduce the Paradox of Fairness that results from a non-egalitarian paradigm, in order to gain a better understanding of the interactions among OJ, employees’ perceptions of justice (EPJ), and MPJ during OC, while providing new concepts (e.g., Point of Origin).
2. 2) Second, to provide some recommendations toward establishing a general theory to describe and explain how human behaviors and contexts interact dynamically (i.e., the development and operation of social constructs in organizations).

Nature of the Essay

The nature of this theoretical essay is qualitative. The essay utilizes an inductive top-down method of theorizing using the results of an integrated literature review method. This theoretical essay is founded on the nature of behaviors that drive individuals toward pursuits in social action, as participants in activities pertaining to whatever they may have had reason to value. People engaged in social action provide a philosophical framework for a grounded theory essay. The substantive exploration of behaviors, grounded in empirical data, guided this investigation of how people and processes influence people to produce social actions.

This essay is presented in a way that provides the reader with certain progress in the analysis of data to the theoretical construction. The integrated literature review maps the scope of this essay and provides a framework for the boundaries of what the essay includes, as well as the limiting factors for what it does not. The integrated literature review offers a meaningful raw material in its groundwork for the methodology chapter.

Research Objectives/Sub-Problems Related to the Problem Statement

Research objectives and sub-problems of the Problem Statement are divided into two steps, with the aim of facilitating inquiries relatively to each research question. First, the objective is to examine how norms of justice, perceptions of these norms, and decisions related to these perceptions are interwoven when people assess change and justice in organizations. The fact that interactions between norms and perceptions of justice are part of decision making for assessments of justice (e.g., fairness), leads to examining how change interacts in this decision making. Moreover, because change occurs over time, for data analysis to be justifiable (i.e., transparent, coherent, and communicable), there is a theoretical need to advance understanding on how contexts and behaviors interact. Thus, one needs to examine why norms of justice, perceptions of these norms, and decisions related to these perceptions are interleaved when people assess change and justice in organizations. The fact that the emotional part of a perception (i.e., sensation) is a non-linear process, while verbal expression of a perception follows a linear logic, leads to the question of meaning in contexts. Therefore, this double interpretation (self-sensation and choice of words), which depends on gender and on cultural environments, needs to be addressed for the robustness of the essay.

Second, having analyzed the data collected from the literature, one must get a better understanding of how and why norms, perceptions, and decisions are related when people assess change or justice. Therefore, the author ­investigated how the interactions between OJ and MPJ facilitate OC management. This latest objective of this theoretical essay will be fulfilled by examining to what extent OC failures originate from: faulty norms of justice; employees’ or managers’ faulty perceptions of justice; or faulty decision-making when managing change or justice in organizations.

Significance of the Essay

Theoretical Contribution

Due to the fact that the non-egalitarian paradigm suggested by the author has been mostly neglected, this selbstverblendung (i.e., incomprehensible blindness) has huge consequences for any human organizational theory. The Paradox of Fairness improves understanding of managing change and justice in organizations. The Point of Origin, the Affordances of Contexts, and the appropriate use of a Restricted Deontic Logic (RDL) (i.e., ternary logic) together provide a new theoretical framework and a new orientation for scholars to do further research toward establishing a general theory to describe and better explain how behaviors and contexts interact dynamically.

Practical Contribution

Taking all the above into consideration (i.e., held in mind) improves understanding of how to implement at best distributive justice in private or public organizations—which in practice improves the chances to succeed with any OC process.

Limitations of the Essay

The non-egalitarian paradigm shift that needs to be done meets resistance due to the habits of human beings regarding the shared norms currently related to equality conventions.

Delimitations of the Essay

The main delimitation is that the literature has been voluntarily restricted (i.e., filtered), and consequently it doesn’t take into account all human knowledge regarding the phenomenon under investigation.

Bibliography

1. Creswell, J. W. (2003). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

2 Concepts

Theoretical Prolegomena

Theorem of Uniqueness

There are words that carry a lot of emotions—like love and freedom—justice is one of them. The intelligence of human beings is a mix of emotional intelligence and verbal intelligence. Emotional intelligence develops first, then comes language, and verbal intelligence constructs itself on and with emotions. Emotions come from our senses. They are the basic means by which we discover our context (i.e., environment we are in). At the beginning, this context is analyzed through a primary mechanism of categorization (PCM) based on pleasure/displeasure (Fidaali, 1987). Each human being travels across many environments during his or her life, facing multiple experiments, which constitute individually our emotional and verbal experiences. The latter help, through language, to experiment virtually with environments we are in or out. All are more or less rituals in sense-making to provide some sense-giving of human life. Each of us is a result of at least a meeting of two human beings (i.e., male and female). With in-vitro technicality, such reproduction can be reduced to one female. Whatever the modality for insemination, that female is not alone, and she is part of the newborn context. Therefore, since the time of being in the uterus, PCM occu...