OVERALL NOTES
•This document contains lesson notes to accompany each powerpoint slide, additional references, sample test questions, and an in-class exercise. The lesson notes include suggestions for classroom discussion and additional information that may be incorporated into the lesson.
•To shorten this lesson, slides 6, 7, and 12 can be omitted without harming the continuity of the lesson.
•Optional introduction: instructors may wish to begin by talking about some of the ways that organizational justice perceptions relate to psychology in general:
oPart of psychology is understanding and predicting behavior. I-O psychologists are interested in workplace behaviors such as job performance, quitting jobs, and stealing from an employer, all of which are related to justice perceptions. Instructors may wish to compare the prediction of these behaviors to theories of motivation or to theories predicting other types of behaviors.
oAdditionally, other types of psychology (e.g., social psychology) focus on the measurement of attitudes and cognition. Justice perceptions could be offered as an example of the study of attitudes in organizations.
NOTES BY SLIDE
2: Think of a time you’ve been unfairly treated at work
This slide is intended to serve as a stimulus – to get students thinking about how the content of this lesson will be directly applicable to their lives, no matter what occupation they ultimately decide to enter. It’s my experience that students love to tell these kinds of stories (i.e., complain about work). The instructor can make this discussion as long or short as is appropriate, but should try to frame the discussion around the concepts to be discussed later in the lesson.
If most students have not had work experience, suggest that they think about when they’ve been unfairly treated in the classroom.
3: Justice Perceptions are Important
The instructor may wish to note that most of the outcomes of justice perceptions can have an economic impact on the organization. ‘Counterproductive behaviors’ refers to theft, sabotage, or even lawsuits against employers. With respect to the last outcome on the list, we should keep in mind that organizations are comprised of human beings, and organizational actions can have substantial effects on employees’ well-being.
All of these reasons are important given the current economy. Many organizations have been forced to lay people off – were these layoffs perceived as fair by employees? What do the employees who weren’t laid off think? Additionally, some organizations have gone bankrupt, using practices that destroyed the retirement savings of its employees (e.g., Enron). How will these employees react?
See Colquitt et al. (2001) for meta-analytic estimates of these (and other) relationships between specific justice dimensions and outcomes.
Here, or at some later point in the lesson, it could be discussed how the domain of organizational justice emerged from related research in social psychology, particularly from studies on relative deprivation and in the social psychology of legal phenomena. Several prominent organizational justice researchers were actually trained as social psychologists. See Byrne & Cropanzano, 2001, for a brief history of organizational justice.
4: Types of Justice Perceptions
The instructor should mention that ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’ are both used in this literature interchangeably. Research and theory in this domain have been conducted in social psychology as well, but has been applied specifically to organizational contexts by I-O psychologists.
NOTE: The precise dimensionality of justice perceptions is still debated. Various contemporary theorists have argued that justice is anything from a single dimension to four dimensions (the missing dimension here is Informational Justice, which refers to the appropriateness of the amount of information you have been provided about the decision and the process; see Colquitt et al., 2001). The present three-dimension typology is similar to that of Folger and Cropanzano (1998), among others.
Distributive Justice
The ‘outcome’ is usually thought of as some decision that has been rendered regarding the employee. Typical examples include hiring decisions, and the outcomes of performance appraisals, raise requests, decisions about downsizing/layoffs, etc.
Example: You apply for a job at a local temp agency with your friend. You believe that you are more qualified than your friend, but your friend is offered the job and you are not.
The instructor should emphasize that this perception has to do only with the outcome, not with whether the process behind the decision was unfair.
The instructor may choose to ask students why outcomes are fair (i.e., generate rules for deciding distributive justice). For instance, how would you allocate pay raises across a group of employees? What’s the fairest way to allocate health care benefits?
Procedural Justice
Example: The woman making the hiring decision at the temp agency was your friend’s aunt, so she offered your friend the job even though you were more qualified. The element of procedural fairness that was violated was the consistency of the hiring procedures used (i.e., she bent the rules for her relative).
The instructor may choose to have students generate rules for making particular decisions here. Suggestion: What’s the fairest way to distribute tickets for college football games (or whatever sport has hard-to-come-by tickets at your institution).
The instructor might want to note that sometimes procedures themselves can be viewed as an outcome, and vice versa (see Cropanzano & Ambrose, 2001), making distinctions between these two aspects of justice somewhat ambiguous at times.
5: Distributive Justice
Note: Slides 5, 6, and 11 can be omitted in the interest of time without detracting from the continuity of the lesson.
The phrase “allocating resources” refers to situations where the organization has some outcome that can be distributed to some employees (for instance, a certain number of promotions or new jobs, or a certain amount of money that can be allocated for raises or bonuses).
Although distributive justice perceptions are merely the perceptions of whether the outcome was fair or not, it has been argued that people use one or more of these rules to decide whether an allocation decision was fair.
The distributive justice rules mentioned here have been argued to be used in different types of situations, but there is scant research about when employees use one rule instead of another to evaluate a decision in an organization. Some psychologists have recently argued that one of the factors may be the employee’s culture. For instance, someone from a more ‘collectivist’ culture may be more likely to use an equality rule of justice, especially among members of his or her close work group.
Examples
Equity Rule: When several employees apply for a promotion, it should be given to the person who is most qualified (that is, the person who has the strongest abilities, or the person who is capable of contributing the most to the organization).
Equality Rule: When health benefits are given out, they should be given to all employees, not just those people who are the hardest workers.
Need Rule: If an employee has a family emergency, a supervisor might give him or her time off. Note that this time off might contrast with the equity rule in that the needy employee might not necessarily be the person whose job performance has been the best.
Most research in Organizational Justice has explored the equity rule.
6: Distributive Justice: Equity Theory
Equity Theory was first proposed by Adams (1965). Adams proposed a theory regarding how people arrive at decisions regarding whether a decision was fair.
The instructor may wish to illustrate this comparison out as an equation:
Employee Inputs Other’s Inputs
------------------- = ------------------
Employee Outcomes Other’s Outcomes
Important Point: If the Other employee is receiving more from the organization (such as getting paid more), the employee won’t think it’s unfair if the Other contributes more to the organization too (by being a better performer, working longer, etc.).
If inequity is perceived, the employee may experience emotional reactions (such as anger) as a result. Adams proposed a number of ways that an individual would act to resolve the inequity, but research has not yet clarified when an individual would choose one path instead of another:
•Employee could decrease inputs (that is, work slower or more sloppily), thus equating the ratios
•Employee could try to get outcomes increased (by asking for a raise)
•Employee could try to get Other to work harder, thus equating the ratios
•Employee could try to get the Other’s Outcomes reduced (e.g., by squealing)
•Employees could choose a different (i.e., more appropriate) Other. Note that this Other might not even be a fellow employee. People could compare themselves to people outside the company (for instance, old friends in the same type of job).
•Employees could cognitively distort the comparison they make (e.g., they could end up convincing themselves that they were in an equitable situation when in fact they were not).
•Employees could leave the situation (i.e., quit)
The above notes focus on situations in which the person was underpaid. Other research has explored what happens when an individual perceives that they have been overpaid (they may increase their productivity to make the situation more equitable, but this effect gradually wears off, possibly because they cognitively reevaluate their inputs to justify the differences in pay).
7: Procedural Justice
‘Voice’ was proposed by Thibaut and Walker (1975), and refers to when individuals (i.e., employees) are given a chance to speak on their own behalf. They distinguished between ‘instrumental’ voice, in which their comments may influence the decision, and ‘noninstrumental’ voice, in which the comments will have no bearing on the outcome (e.g., comments were only allowed after the decision had been made). Various studies have shown both to be effective in various contexts.
The other attributes of procedural fairness come from Leventhal (1976; 1980).
•Consistency: A procedure should be consistent across time and employees
•Bias Suppression: The decision-maker’s personal biases should not play a role
•Accuracy: The procedures should be perceived as accurate (e.g., the procedure should correctly identify the person who is most qualified for the job).
•Correctability: There should be an appeals mechanism in case mistakes are made
•Ethicality: The decision should be made according to prevailing ethical standards
Leventhal did mention one other attribute (Representativeness: all affected parties should be considered when making this decision), but this attribute has been argued to overlap with the construct of ‘voice,’ and it has thus been omitted from the present list.
Why does Procedural Justice matter? There are two different theories (see Lind & Tyler, 1988). One proposes that employees use perceptions of the current process to predict how they’ll fare in future encounters with the organization. The other states that employees want to feel that they are part of the organization, and fair procedures are a sign that they are indeed valued and accepted by the organization.
Organizational Justice Perceptions Notes To Accompany Powerpoint Slides I
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