Cooperation in Groups

Procedural Justice, Social Identity, and Behavioral Engagement

Tom Tyler, Steven Blader

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781841690063
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134948291
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This important new book explores the psychological motives that shape the extent and nature of people's cooperative behavior in the groups, organizations and societies to which they belong. Individuals may choose to expend a great deal of effort on promoting the goals and functioning of the group, they may take a passive role, or they may engage in behaviors targeted towards harming the group and its goals. Such decisions have important implications for the group's functioning and viability, and the goal of this book is to understand the factors that influence these choices.

8

Chapter

Relational Models of Procedural Justice

In chapter 7 we outlined the extensive empirical support for the argument that procedural justice judgments have an important influence on group members’ attitudes, values, and cooperative behaviors. We want to follow up on those findings by examining the factors that shape people’s views about the degree to which a group procedure is fair or unfair. Our concern is with understanding what procedural justice means to those people who are evaluating a group procedure. In other words, what criteria do people use to evaluate whether or not a procedure is fair?

Two dominant explanations have been proposed by social psychologists to explain the meaning of procedural justice (i.e., to understand how people judge the fairness of procedures). One develops from the work of Thibaut and Walker (1975) and is presented in their control model of procedural justice. Thibaut and Walker argued that people typically want to maximize their control over the decisions that determine their outcomes when interacting with others. This influence allows them to control decisions in a way that they feel will result in fair outcomes for them. However, in social situations, people cannot always have such direct outcome control. As a result, in such settings, people seek to maintain indirect control over their outcomes via procedures that provide them with the opportunity to present evidence to decision makers—“process control.”

Thibaut and Walker believed that people will view the opportunity to give evidence (process control) as providing them with the best possibility of receiving fair outcomes in interaction settings in which they cannot have direct control over the decisions made (Thibaut & Walker, 1978). This argument suggests that people will make procedural fairness judgments by assessing their direct or indirect control within a procedure.

The other perspective on the meaning of procedural justice is the group-value model (Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Lind, 1992). The group-value model posits that people place importance on three aspects of procedures: the neutrality of those procedures, inferences about the trustworthiness of the motives of the authorities, and the degree to which people are treated with dignity and politeness during the procedure.

The third and most direct relational issue, about the manner in which one is treated by authorities, develops from the idea of ethicality, originally articulated by Leventhal, Karuza, and Fry (1980). They argued that procedures are evaluated, at least in part, by the degree to which people receive treatment that is consistent with ethical standards. Tyler and Lind (1992) developed this idea, arguing that people are concerned both about the dignity of their interpersonal treatment and about respect for their rights. This idea has been labeled a concern about “standing” or “status recognition.” These labels reflect the argument that interpersonal treatment is important because it communicates a message to the person about their status in relationship to the group. Rude or demeaning (i.e., “unethical”) treatment diminishes the person’s sense of status (Tyler, 1989; Tyler & Lind, 1992).

The group-value model uses this type of concern to illustrate a second type of issue driving people’s definitions of justice—concern about information that speaks to a person’s value as an individual. The group-value model maintains that people use their interactions with the group to assess their social status, and that they value fair procedures because experiencing those procedures leads them to feel valued as people and as group members.

These two perspectives make very different arguments about which aspects of procedures people use in making their procedural justice evaluations. We will briefly review each of these perspectives and explicitly note the implications each one has for the aspects of procedures that individuals should emphasize in making their procedural fairness judgments.

The Control and the Group-Value Models of Procedural Justice

Thibaut and Walker’s (1975) formulation of procedural justice puts forth a social exchange-based explanation for procedural justice effects. Their model is based on the notion that people generally would prefer to have direct control over their outcomes when they are dealing with others. This view suggests that outcomes are the primary concern in interpersonal interactions. The most direct form of control over outcomes, decision control, enables individuals to decide what their outcomes will be. In bargaining, and other market settings, people have complete decision control. They can, for example, decide whether or not they want to buy a new car for $21,000. If they do not, they are free to walk away.

When people go to third parties, such as the courts, to resolve disputes, they relinquish their decision control to some degree, since they will need to abide by the decision of the third party. Of course, there are a variety of procedures that differ in the degree to which the parties give up control to a third party. In mediation, for example, people are still free to reject a third-party settlement, while in arbitration they are not. In all cases in which they give up some degree of decision control, people then desire to have process control, which is indirect control over the outcomes through procedures that allow them to influence the decision of the third party. Process control allows people an opportunity to influence the outcome decisions of the third party, through opportunities to express their position (“voice”). By explaining their position, people expect to shape the third party’s decision to correspond to their own sense of what is right.

Thibaut and Walker (1975, 1978) argued that people view outcome fairness as the desirable result when interacting within group settings and dealing with others. Drawing on equity theory, they defined outcome fairness as equity (Thibaut & Walker, 1978). Equity involves balancing contributions and outcomes and, hence, requires that the decision maker have maximum knowledge of the contributions of the people with whom the decision maker is dealing. In the dispute context, Thibaut and Walker translated this idea into the argument that people equate procedural fairness with procedures that provide them the most opportunity to present the merits of their position to the decision maker. By presenting their side, they potentially are exercising control over the outcome. The Thibaut and Walker approach to procedural justice suggests that people will emphasize the extent to which procedures allow them control, either direct or indirect, over the outcome when evaluating the fairness of the procedure.

The control model of procedural justice provides one explanation for procedural justice effects. Note that this explanation is still tied to a consideration of outcomes: Process control is valuable to individuals because of its potential to influence their outcomes and lead to what individuals are more likely to perceive as fair outcomes for themselves. Due to its role as the impetus to later procedural justice research, the control model of procedural justice has guided that research for many years. Despite the influence of this early view about why people are concerned with procedural justice, a growing body of research findings suggest that the control model is insufficient to explain the way people determine the fairness of decision making processes (Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Dawes, 1993; Tyler, Degoey, & Smith, 1996).

Lind and Tyler (1988) proposed the group-value model as an alternative explanation for why people care about procedural justice. Consequently, the groupvalue model also provides an alternative view concerning the criteria that people use to evaluate the fairness of procedures. This theory maintains that people are concerned with procedural justice because the fairness of procedures conveys information to group members about their status as members of the group. This theory is based on the assumption that people’s views of themselves are largely derived from their experiences in the groups to which they belong.

It is argued in the group-value model that people use the fairness of the procedures they experience when dealing with their group to provide them with important information through which they define their selves, define their status in the group, and assess their self-worth. This group-value model of procedural justice was later expanded into the relational model of authority (Tyler & Lind, 1992), which applies the group-value model to experiences with authorities in hierarchical settings. In sum, the group value model suggests that people are concerned with those aspects of procedures that convey information to them about their status in their group. Unlike the control model, which is rooted in social exchange theory conceptions regarding what people want from others, the group-value model and the relational model are rooted in the social identity theory argument that people use groups to provide them with identity-relevant information about themselves (Tajfel & Turner, 1979, 1986).

A group-value model perspective suggests that people primarily will be concerned with “relational” aspects of procedures. These relational aspects of procedures are those aspects of a procedure that communicate information about identity-relevant attributes of the group’s processes. They are distinct from the favorability or the fairness of the outcome to the individual. Instead, they are more directly focused on the procedure itself and the information that procedure communicates about the people affected by it, instead of how that procedure leads to particular outcomes.

Past research on the group-value model has identified several constructs that capture the distinctly “relational” aspects of procedures (Tyler, 1989; Tyler et al., 1996). Standing or status recognition, trust in the motives of the authorities, and neutrality in decision making all are constructs that reflect the relational quality of procedures. The relational nature of these constructs lies in the idea that each carries identity-relevant implications for the individual making the judgment, yet they all are distinct from the favorability of the outcome for the individual.

Status recognition refers to the quality of treatment that people experience in their interactions with group authorities—whether they are treated politely and with dignity, and whether respect is shown for their rights (i.e., aspects of experience that tell people about their standing in the group). Trustworthiness measures the extent to which people trust the motives of group authorities (i.e., view them as benevolent, concerned, and caring). Neutrality refers to the extent to which people feel that the group makes decisions in an unbiased manner, based on facts and rules, and not on personal opinions or preferences.

Research finds that these three relational constructs all are important predictors of procedural justice evaluations, typically exceeding the importance both of control and other outcome-oriented judgments (Bies, Martin, & Brockner, 1993; Giacobbe-Miller, 1995; G...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 The Design of this Study
• Chapter 3 Why Study Cooperative Behavior in Groups?
• Chapter 4 Instrumental Motivations for Engaging in Cooperative Behavior
• Chapter 5 Internally Driven Cooperative Behavior
• Chapter 6 The Influence of Justice-Based Judgments
• Chapter 7 Procedural Justice and Cooperative Behavior
• Chapter 8 Relational Models of Procedural Justice
• Chapter 9 A Two-Component Model of Procedural Justice Quality of Decision Making and Quality of Treatment
• Chapter 10 Creating a Four-Component Model of Procedural Justice Adding the Distinction Between Formal and Informal Sources of Justice
• Chapter 11 Social Identity and Cooperative Behavior
• Chapter 12 Justice and Group Status The Antecedents of Status Evaluations
• Chapter 13 Psychological Engagement with the Group
• Chapter 14 Understanding Group Behavior from a Noninstrumental Perspective
• References
• Appendix: Employee Satisfacation Questionnaire
• Author Index
• Subject Index