Business
Organizational Justice
Organizational justice refers to the perceived fairness in the workplace, encompassing distributive justice (fairness in outcomes), procedural justice (fairness in decision-making processes), and interactional justice (fairness in interpersonal treatment). It is crucial for employee satisfaction, trust, and commitment, and can impact organizational performance and employee well-being. Organizations that prioritize organizational justice tend to have higher levels of employee engagement and retention.
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11 Key excerpts on "Organizational Justice"
eBook - PDF- Mollie Painter-Morland, René ten Bos(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
13 Fortin sums this up: Organization justice is concerned with people’s fairness perceptions in their employment relationships . . . Justice perceptions have been shown to have effects on people’s motivation, well being, performance, attitudes, behaviours and other outcomes relevant for organizations and organizational members. 14 What we have is not so much a concern with justice as an individual or communal ideal associated with the relations between people in society, but rather as a matter of perception – if it feels good, it can’t be injustice! The focus is invariably on whether people perceive that others are being unjust to them. By definition we have a type of upside-down pleonexia at play – justice relates to me ensuring that I do feel that I am not being taken advantage of by others, rather than relating to any social or ethical feeling, thought, or action on my part towards others. In other words, the social scientific approach to justice is one of ‘me first’ and based on my ‘perceptions’. As such, it runs the danger of inadvertently supporting a solipsistic and relativist idea of justice – one robbed of the social and political by its obsession with individualized perceptions and their numerical aggregation. Dimensions of Organizational Justice The most common way that Organizational Justice is understood is in terms of its separation into three distinct ‘dimensions’ – those of distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice. The identification and study of each of these dimensions has developed progressively since the early interest 146 Carl Rhodes in Organizational Justice in the 1950s. Until the 1970s the research efforts were almost exclusively dedicated to distributive justice and the ways in which resources were or were not perceived to be distributed fairly in organizations.
eBook - PDF- Stephen W. Gilliland, Dirk D. Steiner, Daniel P. Skarlicki(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Information Age Publishing(Publisher)
CHAPTER 1 4 S. L. BLADER and D. R. BOBOCEL Organizational Justice continues to be a burgeoning topic in the man-agement literature. Originating with social psychological research on rel-ative deprivation (Tyler, Boeckmann, Smith, & Huo, 1997), research on justice in organizations has evolved through a variety of phases. Early applications of social justice research to organizational contexts empha-sized the importance employees place on their evaluations of the fair-ness of the outcomes (distributive justice) they experience in their work organizations (e.g., Greenberg, 1988; Pritchard, Dunnette, & Jorgenson, 1972). This emphasis on distributive justice transformed into an empha-sis on procedural justice, and in particular, on evaluations of the fair-ness of decision making processes. More recent work has highlighted the importance of the fairness or quality of treatment that employees expe-rience. Whether the focus is on outcomes, decision making processes, or treat-ment, Organizational Justice research finds that fairness perceptions have a vital impact on attitudes and behaviors at work. This relationship between fairness and attitudes and behavior is one of the most robust findings in the management literature (e.g., Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter, & Ng, 2001), and continues to fuel researchers’ interest in justice in the workplace. One particular trend in Organizational Justice research—evidenced by the theme of this volume—is a focus on the psy-chological processes that explain why employees are motivated by their evaluations of the justice experienced in their work organizations. Rather than simply focusing on the phenomena of employee reactions to fair-ness, this trend represents a desire to understand why fairness has such a potent impact on employee attitudes and behavior.
eBook - ePub- E. Allan Lind(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
10 Organizational Justice is Alive and Well and Living Elsewhere (But Not Too Far Away) Joel Brockner and Batia M. WiesenfeldOrganizational Justice refers to employees’ perceptions of fairness as well as the impact of such fairness perceptions on what they think, feel, and do in the workplace (Greenberg, 1987). In their overview of historical trends in the Organizational Justice literature, Colquitt, Greenberg, and Zapata-Phelan (2005) noted that it consisted of four waves, in the following chronological order. First, the distributive justice wave focused on outcome fairness (e.g., Adams, 1965). Second, the procedural justice wave concerned itself with the fairness of the methods used by authorities to make decisions (e.g., Lind & Tyler, 1988; Thibaut & Walker, 1975). Third, the interactional justice wave centered on the appropriateness of authorities’ interpersonal behavior while carrying out decisions (e.g., Bies, 1987). Fourth, the integrative wave examined the joint and often interactive effect of various elements of fairness (e.g., Brockner & Wiesenfeld, 1996).Whereas the four waves differed in several respects, the emphasis in each was on the consequences of fairness. Having established the pervasive effects of fairness, Organizational Justice researchers have changed the paradigm in the years since the Colquitt et al. (2005) review, focusing heavily on the antecedents of fairness. Elsewhere, we referred to this shift as the “fifth wave” of Organizational Justice (Brockner, Wiesenfeld, Siegel, Bobocel, & Liu, 2015). Moreover, we provided a taxonomy to organize the many ways in which fairness has been and continues to be studied as a dependent variable. For instance, a spate of theoretical (e.g., Molinsky & Margolis, 2005; Scott, Colquitt, & Paddock, 2009) and empirical papers (e.g., Blader & Chen, 2012; Zhao, Chen, & Brockner, 2015) have sought to explain when and why managers will behave more versus less fairly.
eBook - PDF- S. C Carr, M. MacLachlan, A. Furnham, S. C Carr, M. MacLachlan, A. Furnham(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Justice is not only relevant to workers in a company but also their cus- tomers (Hui & Au, 2001). Dayan, Al-Tamimi and Elhadji (2008) found that interactional justice (i.e., courtesy) and distributive justice (i.e., refund) were clearly linked to customer loyalty. This stresses the consequences of the per- ceptions of justice in an organization, for example, civil service and society organizations like government departments, NGOs, micro-credit lenders and international development banks. Organizational Justice is usually thought of as people’s (manager and employee) perceptions of fairness in an organization’s policies, pay systems and practices. The concept of justice and how justice is meted out in any organization is, nearly always, fundamental to that organization’s corporate culture and mission. The psychological literature tends to be descriptive (focusing on perceptions and reactions), whereas moral philosophy writ- ings are more prescriptive (specifying what should be done). References to questions of justice and fairness occur whenever decisions have to be made about the allocation of resources, whatever they are in a particular business. Most, but by no means all, fairness-at-work issues focus on pay, but also include selection, promotion and the granting of particular privileges and career promotions (Furnham & Petrides, 2006). Different disciplines have become interested in Organizational Justice. Thus cross-cultural psychologists have noted how the concept of fairness at work differs between cultures (Shiraev & Levy, 2004) and religions (Singh et al., 2009) and how justice perceptions and reasoning are cultur- ally determined (Miller, 2007). Cultural dimensions like individualism- collectivism and power-distance have been used to try to explain cultural differences in perceptions of fairness at work (Kim & Leung, 2007).
eBook - ePubExploring Positive Relationships at Work
Building a Theoretical and Research Foundation
- Jane E. Dutton, Belle Rose Ragins, Jane E. Dutton, Belle Rose Ragins(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
88 Positive Organizational Justice: From Fair to Fairer—and Beyond
Jerald GreenbergOver the past two decades, organizational scientists have devoted considerable attention to studying people’s perceptions of fairness in organizations—a concept known as Organizational Justice (Greenberg, 1987; Greenberg & Colquitt, 2005). Historically, researchers and theorists have focused attention on three major forms of Organizational Justice (Colquitt, Greenberg, & Zapata-Phelan, 2005). Specifically, these are:- Distributive justice —The perceived fairness of the distribution of rewards and resources between parties.
- Procedural justice —-The perceived fairness of the methods and procedures used as the basis for making decisions.
- Interactional justice —The perceived fairness of the interpersonal treatment accorded others in the course of communicating with them.
Despite the moniker, it may be observed that the field of Organizational Justice has emphasized not the attainment of justice per se, but the avoidance of injustice by managers and responses to injustice by subordinates. We see this with respect to all three types of justice. For example, scientists have studied responses to distributive injustices in such forms as reductions in performance (e.g., Greenberg, 1996) and increases in employee theft (e.g., Greenberg, 1990a) following inequitably low levels of desired rewards. Researchers also have studied job dissatisfaction (e.g., McFarlin & Sweeney, 1992), turnover intentions (e.g., Simons & Roberson, 2003), and noncompliance with tax laws (e.g., Wenzel, 2002) stemming from procedurally unfair work policies. Additionally, studies have assessed how violations of interactional justice in the form of rude and uncaring supervision discourages workers from following company policies (e.g., Greenberg, 1994) and encourages them to engage in various forms of retaliation against their bosses (Skarlicki & Folger, 1997), including the initiation of lawsuits against former employers (e.g., Lind, Greenberg, Scott, & Welchans, 2000). These are just a few of many examples of attention to the negative side of justice that may be found in the literature (for overviews, see Colquitt & Greenberg, 2003; Greenberg & Colquitt, 2005).
eBook - ePubThe SAGE Handbook of Industrial, Work & Organizational Psychology
V2: Organizational Psychology
- Deniz S Ones, Neil Anderson, Chockalingam Viswesvaran, Handan Kepir Sinangil, Deniz S Ones, Neil Anderson, Chockalingam Viswesvaran, Handan Kepir Sinangil, Author(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
3 Organizational Justice Stephen W. GillilandINTRODUCTION
Philosophers, political scientists, politicians, jurists, and economists traditionally have been the ones concerned with the just distribution of wealth, power, goods, and services in society. Social psychologists and their brethren … have displayed remarkably little professional interest in this, despite the fact that the process of exchange is almost continual in human interactions. (Adams, 1965, p. 267)With this observation 50 years ago, Stacy Adams (1965) sparked an interest in Organizational Justice that has continued to grow over the intervening decades and has come to represent one of the dominant theoretical orientations for understanding attitudes, emotions, and motivation in the workplace. From studies of equity in the 1960s and 1970s, to the inclusion of decision process fairness issues (i.e., procedural justice) and formal introduction of the term Organizational Justice in the 1980s, the evolution of Organizational Justice has occurred through thousands of studies in psychology and management (Colquitt et al., 2013; Greenberg & Colquitt, 2005). Contrary to when Adams wrote his seminal chapter on equity theory, organizational scholars in industrial/organizational psychology and management have demonstrated considerable interest in Organizational Justice and have written more than 2,500 papers on Organizational Justice in the past decade alone.Organizational Justice is a social construct that refers to subjective perceptions of fairness in an organizational setting (Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter, & Ng, 2001). The study of antecedents of Organizational Justice has linked organizational decisions and decision processes with employee (and in some cases third-party) perceptions of fairness (Greenberg & Colquitt, 2005). Consequences of Organizational Justice perceptions include a wide variety of work attitudes, behaviors, and emotions (Cohen-Charash & Spector, 2001; Colquitt et al., 2001, 2013). Areas of application include most areas of human resource management (e.g., Folger & Cropanzano, 1998; Gilliland & Steiner, 2012), many areas of organizational behavior (e.g., organizational citizenship behavior, Moorman & Byrne, 2005; counterproductive work behavior, Conlon, Meyer, & Nowakowski, 2005; stress, Judge & Colquitt, 2004; teams, Colquitt, Noe, & Jackson, 2002), and other areas of business (e.g., marketing, Maxham & Netemeyer, 2003; accounting, Libby, 1999; management information systems, Son & Kim, 2008).
eBook - PDFCurrent Issues in Services Management
Multidisciplinary Perspectives
- Elbeyi Pelit, Hasan Hüseyin Soybali, Ali Avan, Elbeyi Pelit, Hasan Hüseyin Soybali, Ali Avan(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Peter Lang Group(Publisher)
(Folger & Cropanzano, 1998: 26). Organizational Justice, in the related literature (Aryee et al. 2004; Cropanzano et al. 2001; Greenberg, 2004; Moorman, 1991; Skarlicki & Folger, 1997; Van Yperen et al. 2000), is often classified in three dimensions as distributive, procedural, and interactional justice. Distributional justice is the perceptions of employees as a result of the com- parison of gains they believe to be deserved and the results they have at the end of the distribution process (Skarlicki & Folger, 1997: 435). The scope of distri- bution consists of awards, wages, duties, and benefits. Again, it should be noted that the issue of distributional justice is not only a process between employee and management, but the gains are compared with other employees. This can be explained by the Relative Deprivation Theory and the Equity Theory. Foley et al. (2002: 473–474), substantiate the distributional justice as the requirement of similar treatment to similar individuals and different treatment to different individuals based on the proportion of similarities and differences. According to Equity Theory, individuals compare their own gains with the gains of other employees (Adams, 1965). According to Relative Deprivation theory, the individual compares his gains with those of others rather than evaluating them within himself (Colquitt et al. 2005: 13–14). As a result of the comparisons made by the employees, the perceived injustice can lead the behaviors towards the work and organization. The procedural justice can be expressed as perceived justice related to the processes used in decision-making (Lin & Hsieh, 2010). The emergence of the procedural justice dimension is based on the work of Thibaut and Walker (1978), which focuses on the procedures involved in the distribution, rather than focusing on what has been achieved in the distribution.
- Constant D. Beugre(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Information Age Publishing(Publisher)
Thus, justice judgments are made at three levels: distributive, procedural, and interactional justice. I discuss these three dimensions in the next section of the chapter. Since these dimensions have been exten-sively studied in the organization justice literature (see Beugré, 1998a; Cropanzano & Greenberg, 1997; Folger & Cropanzano, 1998), I will only focus on their main assumptions here. JUSTICE DIMENSIONS Distributive Justice In modern organizations, questions of justice are fundamental when-ever resources are distributed (Greenberg & Lind, 2000). People care about distributive justice because organizational resources are limited. Thus, people want to know whether they can get their fair share of these limited resources. When this happens, they experience a sense of distribu-tive justice. However, distributive injustice occurs when a person does not get the amount of reward he or she expects in comparison with the reward some other gets (Deutsch, 1985). Distributive justice refers to perceptions of outcome fairness (Adams, 1963, 1965; Deutsch, 1985; Homans, 1961). Homans (1961) first coined the concept of distributive justice. He used the concepts of investments and profits to qualify the exchange relation-ship between two parties. Investments refer to inputs, to what the person brings to the relationship, whereas profits refer to what the person gets from the relationship. According to Homans (1961), profits should be A Cultural Perspective of Organizationl Justice 15 proportional to investments, such that the greater the investments, the higher the profits. He contends that a man in an exchange relation with another will expect the profits to be directly proportional to his investments and when each is being rewarded by some third party he will expect the third party to maintain this relation between the two of them. (p. 244) Thus, judgments related to distributive justice are based on social com-parisons.
eBook - PDF- Julian Barling, E. Kevin Kelloway, Michael R. Frone, Julian Barling, E . Kevin Kelloway, Michael R. Frone(Authors)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
Subsequent research has revealed strong support for inter-actional justice as a separate dimension (Masterson, Lewis, Goldman, & Taylor, 2000; Goldman, 2003). Before moving on, we should note that some scholars have subdivided interactional justice into two components. These include interpersonal jus-tice (the extent to which one is treated with politeness and esteem) and informational justice (the extent to which one receives social accounts and explanations about events and process) (e.g., Greenberg, 1993). Evidence is beginning to support this model (e.g., Colquitt, 2001). However, because the research discussed herein tends not to separate interactional justice into these two component parts, our present review will not do so either. We empha-size, however, that this should be an important consideration for future research. Organizational Justice 65 Summary So far we have learned two important things about Organizational Justice. First, the term refers to perceptual or subjective phenomena. In this sense, when we study “justice,” we are studying how people form justice judg-ments and how these judgments affect subsequent responses. Second, we have seen that there are at least three families of justice perceptions— outcomes, processes, and interpersonal interactions—with each correspond-ing to a different aspect of the work environment. What remains is for us to examine the linkages between these different types of justice and worker stress. An Overview of the Research _________________________ As Kahn and Byosiere (1992) have noted, the term stress has been defined in sundry ways, each definition somewhat distinct from others. In this chapter, and consistent with one of the usages suggested by Kahn and Byosiere, we use the word stress to indicate a process whereby environmental events called “stressors” induce consequences for individuals.
- Stephen W. Gilliland, Dirk D. Steiner, Daniel P. Skarlicki(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Information Age Publishing(Publisher)
In P.C. Earley & M. Erez (Eds.), New perspectives on international indus-trial/organizational psychology . San Francisco: New Lexington Press. Tyler, T.R. (1994). Psychological models of the justice motive: Antecedents of dis-tributive and procedural justice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 850-863. Van den Bos, K., Vermunt, R., & Wilke, H.A.M. (1997). Procedural and distributive justice: What is fair depends more on what comes first than on what comes next. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 95-104. 139 CHAPTER 6 AN Organizational Justice ANALYSIS OF DIVERSITY TRAINING Stephen W. Gilliland and Cindi Kaufman Gilliland ABSTRACT Diversity training in the United States has been seen as everything from a critical strategic business advantage to a source of discrimination lawsuits. In an attempt to understand such varied reactions to diversity training pro-grams, we examine diversity training from an Organizational Justice perspec-tive. Organizational Justice principles of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice are extended to general training programs as a possible framework for understanding reactions to training. We then examine the administration and delivery of diversity training from the perspective of these justice principles. Research propositions and recommended training prac-tices are provided. The final section of this chapter considers individual dif-ferences in reactions to diversity training based on beliefs in multiculturalism. We hypothesize how different multicultural beliefs (radical structuralists vs. functionalists) influence preferences for different justice principles and thereby shape reactions to diversity training. We also speculate on the value of studying multicultural beliefs in other areas of Organizational Justice beyond diversity training. INTRODUCTION Diversity management initiatives at 55 Orange County and California companies .
- Robert G. Folger, Russell Cropanzano(Authors)
- 1998(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
This would be the case for specific areas of h u m a n resources m a n a g e m e n t practice. A h u m a n resources function such as testing might have certain n o r m s of propriety regarding confidentiality and privacy, for example, whose impact on perceived fairness is greater than the impact of those issues regarding other aspects of work (e.g., r a n d o m searches for weapons). Sub-sequent chapters of this book treat in m o r e detail the fairness n o r m s of interactional justice specific to various areas of h u m a n resources manage-ment. Interpersonal Treatment. Being fairly treated goes beyond receiving fair out-comes, as the work on procedural justice has suggested. In turn, the work on interactional justice has suggested that being fairly treated goes beyond the formal characteristics of procedures. Some origins of the interactional justice concept, however, come from early work on procedural justice that constitutes an alternative to Thibaut and Walker's (1975,1978) orientation. In particular, Leventhal (1980) extended procedural justice beyond process control by citing the following criteria: consistency (applying standards uniformly over time and across persons), bias suppression (minimizing personal self-interest and narrow preconceptions), accuracy (relying on high-quality information and well-informed opinion), correctability (allowing decisions to be reviewed and revised or reversed), representativeness (taking into account various inter-ests), and ethicality (taking into account prevalent standards of m o r a l con-duct). Several of those have been incorporated into the reviews of procedural enactment summarized earlier. The ethicality criterion and its emphasis on moral conduct, however, seem to stand apart from the rest.
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