The Social Construction of Injustice: Fairness Judgments in Response to Own and Others' Unfair Treatment by Authorities

Personal relevance affects the perceived immorality of politically-charged threats

Personal similarities to a transgressor makes one view the transgression as less immoral. We investigated whether personal relevance might also affect the perceived immorality of politically-charged threats. We hypothesized that increasing the personal relevance of a threat would lead participants to report the threat as more immoral, even for threats the participant might otherwise view indifferently. U.S. participants recruited online (N = 488) were randomly assigned to write about the personal relevance of either a liberal threat (pollution), conservative threat (disrespecting an elder), neutral threat (romantic infidelity), or given a control filler task. Participants then rated how immoral and personally relevant each political threat was, as well as reported their political ideology. Partial support for our hypothesis emerged: when primed with conservative writing prompts, liberal-leaning participants rated the conservative threat as more immoral, compared with the same threat after a liberal writing prompt. We did not find these results for conservative-leaning participants, perhaps because all participants cared relatively equally about the liberal threat.

Expatriates’ Embeddedness and Host Country Withdrawal Intention: A Social Exchange Perspective

In this study, we conceptualize the thus far little explored relationship between expatriate and host country as a form of social exchange governed by the norm of reciprocity. Drawing from social exchange theory and our analysis of 451 self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) living and working in the United Arab Emirates, we examine whether the degree of SIEs’ career and community embeddedness explains their host country withdrawal intention via enhanced perceived institutional trust and a more tolerant attitude toward workplace discrimination. Our results provide general support for our theoretical model and most of our hypotheses. In this way, our article makes three contributions. First, it suggests a novel way to conceptualize the relationship between SIEs and host country as a form of social exchange. Second, it differentiates between two dimensions of embeddedness and explicates how the two contribute to SIEs’ intentions to stay in the host country. Finally, the analysis theorizes and empirically tests two previously little explored mechanisms of enhanced institutional trust and a more tolerant attitude toward workplace discrimination through which SIEs’ host country embeddedness influences their host country withdrawal intentions.

Perceived overall injustice and organizational deviance-Mediating effect of anger and moderating effect of moral disengagement

Introduction

This study is dedicated to exploring the influence of perceived overall injustice on employee anger and deviant behavior. Based on fairness heuristic theory and cognitive appraisal theory of emotion, a model was developed to investigate the relationship between perceived overall injustice, anger and organizational deviance. Based on social cognitive theory, the moderating role of moral disengagement was proposed.

Methods

The data were collected from three Chinese manufacturing corporations with a total effective sample size of 264. SPSS 26 and Mplus 8.3 were adopted to analyze data. Confirmatory factor analysis, descriptive statistics analysis and correlation results were illustrated. Hierarchical regression was used to test the model.

Results

Statistical results showed that there is a significant positive relationship among perceived overall injustice, anger and organizational deviance. The moderating effect of moral disengagement on the relationship between perceived overall injustice and organizational deviance is significant, while that on the relationship between anger and organizational deviance is insignificant.

Discussion

This study built a model to discuss the emotional and behavioral influences of perceived overall injustice. The findings suggest that individuals feel more anger as the level of perceived overall injustice increases, which thus lead to higher level of organizational deviance. Morally disengaged employees are more likely to engage in organizational deviance after being treated unfairly. However, the moderating effect of moral disengagement on the relationship of anger and organizational deviance was insignificant. The reason might be because anger is an aggressive emotion and individual experiencing anger may lead to impulsive behavior regardless of moral rules. Implications and limitations have been discussed.

Does Internet Connect to Social Justice Perception in China?

The world has witnessed an important and dramatic transition during the past decades, with social and economic challenges related to the advancement of digital technologies. Meanwhile, inequalities of distributions of resources and opportunities obstinately exist around the world. This study innovates by utilizing household survey datasets to empirically evaluate the impact of Internet utilization on individual's perception toward social justice in China. Estimates suggest that Internet utilization generates a significant negative effect on perceived social justice (in general, -5%). In China, there are 1.032 billion Internet users by the end of 2021, accounting for 73% of the total population (China Internet Network Information Center). It suggests that 3.65% of the population, around 5 million people, might consider the current society is injustice if all circumstances remain unchanged. For robustness checks, we not only run multivariate regressions, implemented different model specification, and used alternative measures as well as datasets, but also approached instrumental variable estimation with regional rainfall for causal inference. Consistent conclusions are found. Also, we found stronger negative effects among male, eastern provinces, and urban area samples. To the end, our results shed lights on policy implication, for example, Internet associated public interventions can be focused on justice cultivation and information transparency.

How LMX Differentiation Attenuates the Influence of Ethical Leadership on Workplace Deviance: The Mediating Role of Psychological Empowerment

The previous research has mostly proposed that ethical leadership contributed to less deviant behavior; however, recent studies found that this relationship might not always be significant. Therefore, a deeper and more nuanced investigation of how and when ethical leadership influences deviant behavior is highly warranted. In the present research, drawing on social learning theory as our overarching theoretical framework, we posited that high level of LMX differentiation will impede the effect of ethical leadership on employee deviant behavior, and thus, ethical leadership could reduce employees' deviant behavior in teams with lower LMX differentiation rather than high LMX differentiation. Furthermore, we proposed that the interactive effect of ethical leadership and LMX differentiation on employee deviant behavior is mediated by employee psychological empowerment. More specifically, ethical leadership is more likely to enhance employee psychological empowerment in teams with low LMX differentiation than in teams with high LMX differentiation, and enhanced psychological empowerment contributed to less deviant behavior. Through a multi-source field study via 379 paired samples from the southwest of China, we found support for all of our hypotheses. The results' contribution to research on organizational behavior, limitations in the study, and future directions for researchers are also discussed.

How to fairly allocate scarce medical resources? Controversial preferences of healthcare professionals with different personal characteristics

The scarcity of medical resources is widely recognized, and therefore priority setting is inevitable. This study examines whether Portuguese healthcare professionals (physicians vs nurses): (i) share the moral guidance proposed by ethicists and (ii) attitudes toward prioritization criteria vary among individual and professional characteristics. A sample of 254 healthcare professionals were confronted with hypothetical prioritization scenarios involving two patients distinguished by personal or health characteristics. Descriptive statistics and parametric analyses were performed to evaluate and compare the adherence of both groups of healthcare professionals regarding 10 rationing criteria: waiting time, treatment prognosis measured in life expectancy and quality of life, severity of health conditions measured in pain and immediate risk of dying, age discrimination measured in favoring the young over older and favoring the youngest over the young, merit evaluated positively or negatively, and parenthood. The findings show a slight adherence to the criteria. Waiting time and patient pain were the conditions considered fairer by respondents in contrast with the ethicists normative. Preferences for distributive justice vary by professional group and among participants with different political orientations, rationing experience, years of experience, and level of satisfaction with the NHS. Decision-makers should consider the opinion of ethicists, but also those of healthcare professionals to legitimize explicit guidelines.

The “Evil Pleasure”: Abusive Supervision and Third-Party Observers’ Malicious Reactions Toward Victims

We investigated how abusive supervision influences interactions between third-party observers and abused victims and hypothesized when and why third parties react maliciously toward victims of abusive supervision. Drawing on the theory of rivalry, we predicted that third-party observers would experience an “evil pleasure” (schadenfreude) when they perceive a high level of rivalry with the victims of abusive supervision and that the experienced schadenfreude then would motivate third parties to engage in interpersonal destructive behaviors (i.e., undermining, incivility, and interpersonal deviance) toward the victims. We further proposed that such malicious reactions would be attenuated if groups have a high level of cooperative goals. Results based on one experimental study and two time-lagged field studies lend support to our propositions.

Grey shade of work environment triad – effect of supervisor ostracism and perceived organizational obstruction on employees' behaviour: a moderated-mediation model

Purpose

This study, based on the moderated-mediation model, investigates the indirect effect of facades of conformity in the relationship between supervisor ostracism and unethical work behaviour. Furthermore, this study tested the moderating role of perceived organizational obstruction in the aforementioned relationship through facades of conformity.

Design/methodology/approach

Employing a multi-wave and two-source data from employees and peers (n = 264) of the services sector in Pakistan, the authors tested the proposed framework using Hayes and Preacher moderated-mediation technique.

Findings

The findings reflect that supervisor ostracism encourages unethical behaviour at the workplace. Further, results revealed that facades of conformity mediated this direct relationship. Moreover, the authors found that perceived organizational obstruction moderated the relationship between supervisor ostracism and facades of conformity. Results also confirm that perceived organizational obstruction moderates the mediated relationship.

Research limitations/implications

The paper concludes with a discussion, managerial implications, limitations and directions for future research.

Originality/value

This study added value in the literature of supervisor ostracism, facades of conformity, unethical work behaviour and perceived organizational obstruction.

Leadership Ostracism Behaviors From the Target's Perspective: A Content and Behavioral Typology Model Derived From Interviews With Chinese Employees

Leadership ostracism denotes a severe work stressor, potentially entailing more serious negative effects than other types of workplace ostracism. However, scholars have paid relatively little attention to ostracism carried out by leaders, leaving the phenomenon insufficiently accounted for in the literature. Hence, the present study aims to explore the content and typology of leadership ostracism behavior by in-depth interviews and inductive analyses based on grounded theory, in order to give a thorough presentation and description of the leadership ostracism concept as perceived and construed by Chinese subordinates. Respondents were invited using a snowball sampling technique, and the final sample consisted of 26 individuals employed in different Chinese firms. Based on the reported experience of the interviewees, 11 concrete leadership ostracism behaviors emerged from the data. Further analyses revealed a leadership ostracism behavioral typology model reflecting five core categories, i.e., general ignoring, neglect, exclusion, differential treatment, and undermining. These findings appear to partly replicate and partly expand on previous conceptualizations of workplace ostracism, indicating that leadership ostracism may reflect a distinct variant of the phenomenon, eligible to be studied in its own right. The present study also discusses certain culture-specific aspects of leadership ostracism that can be taken into consideration in future studies.

Great expectations

Purpose

Organizational fairness has been shown to affect numerous employee outcomes, including organizational commitment and job satisfaction. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether an expatriate manager’s favorability toward accepting a foreign assignment affects the way they respond to subsequent treatment in the workplace, viewed in terms of organizational justice.

Design/methodology/approach

Data were gathered in two stages from 175 expatriate managers located in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). To test the authors’ predictions, the authors analyzed organizational commitment and job satisfaction as a function of organizational fairness (distributive and interpersonal) and pre-departure opinion.

Findings

The results suggest that expatriate managers who express a higher degree of favorability toward accepting a foreign assignment appear less reactive to changes in organizational fairness. Meanwhile, expatriate managers who express a lesser degree of favorability toward accepting the foreign assignment appear more sensitive to workplace fairness, such that when they feel treated unfairly, they demonstrate worse outcomes than those who were in favor of the assignment, and when they feel treated fairly, they demonstrate better outcomes than those who were in favor of the assignment. The net effect of pre-departure opinion appears to be an amplification of the relationship between subsequent fairness and outcomes.

Practical implications

Expatriate managers with a less favorable view of their assignment may harbor deep questions about whether they want to be in this new job capacity, and may therefore be more sensitive to how they are treated. Alternatively, people with a more favorable view of their assignment may have already decided they want to be in the new capacity, and so may be more robust to workplace treatment.

Originality/value

To the authors’ knowledge, this paper constitutes the first investigation of the effects of expatriate pre-departure opinion (i.e. favorability toward accepting a foreign assignment) on job satisfaction and commitment within the context of organizational justice. Furthermore, the UAE is a highly relevant context to study expatriate behavior.

Reliability and validity of the Korean version of organizational justice questionnaire

Background

Many studies show that organizational justice (OJ) is related to psychological determinants of employee health. To prevent health problems related to OJ in Korean workplaces and to accurately measure OJ, we developed the Korean version of the Organizational Justice Questionnaire (K-OJQ) and assessed its validity and reliability.

Methods

A questionnaire draft of the K-OJQ was developed using back-translation methods, which was preliminary tested by 32 employees in Korea. Feedback was received and the K-OJQ was finalized. This study used data from 303 workers (172 males, 131 females) in Korea using the K-OJQ, job stress, and lifestyle questionnaires.

Results

Cronbach's α coefficients of the internal consistency reliability was 0.92 for procedural justice and 0.94 for interactional justice. Factor analyses using SPSS 24 and Amos 23 extracted two expected factors, named procedural justice (7 items; range, 1.0-5.0) and interactional justice (6 items; range, 1.0-5.0) and showed a reliable fit (χ² = 182; p = .000; GFI = .912; AGFI = .877; CFI = .965; RMSEA = .077). Furthermore, higher procedural justice and interactional justice levels were correlated with lower job demand (- 0.33; - 0.36), insufficient job control (- 0.36; - 0.41), interpersonal conflict (- 0.45; - 0.51), job insecurity (- 0.33; - 0.34), organizational system (- 0.64; - 0.64), and lack of reward (- 0.55; - 0.63).

Conclusions

The K-OJQ was objectively validated through statistical methods.

So Gross and Yet so Far Away: Psychological Distance Moderates the Effect of Disgust on Moral Judgment

People morally evaluate norm violations that occur at various distances from the self (e.g., a corrupt politician vs. a cheating spouse). Yet, distance is rarely studied as a moderator of moral judgment processes. We focus on the influence of disgust on moral judgments, as evidence here has remained inconclusive. Based on feelings as information theory and the notion that disgust evolved as a pathogen avoidance mechanism, we argue that disgust influences moral judgment of psychologically distant (vs. near) norm violations. Studies 1 and 3 show that trait disgust sensitivity (but not trait anger and fear) more strongly predicts moral judgment of distant than near violations. Studies 2 and 4 show that incidental disgust affects moral judgment of distant (vs. near) violations and that the moderating role of distance is mediated by involvement of others (vs. the self) in the evaluator’s conceptualization of the violation.

Polarization of Perceived Procedural Justice

This study examined polarization of perceptions of Procedural Justice. Two polarization mechanisms are examined, Persuasive Arguments and Social Comparisons. Participants were students enrolled in a first-year introductory business class. There were 216 participants in the Persuasive Arguments study, 429 in the Social Comparisons study. The average age of all participants was 22.3 yr. ( SD = 2.1); 56% were women. Fields of study represented were business, engineering, information technology, and sports. Analysis showed under conditions of low Procedural Justice, polarization effects were only found with the Persuasive Arguments mechanism. Under conditions of high Procedural Justice, polarization effects were only found with Social Comparisons. Implications for group polarization and Procedural Justice theories are considered.

Teachers' legitimacy: Effects of justice perception and social comparison processes

BACKGROUND

Teachers' legitimacy is central to school functioning. Teachers' justice, whether distributive or procedural, predicts teachers' legitimacy.

AIMS

What is still do be found, and constitutes the goal of this paper, is whether unjust treatment by a teacher affects the legitimacy of the teacher differently when the student knows that the teacher was fair to a peer (comparative judgement) or when the student does not have that information (autonomous judgement).

SAMPLES

A total of 79 high school students participated in Study 1; 75 high school students participated in Study 2.

METHODS

Two experimental studies with a 2 justice valence (just, unjust) × 2 social comparison processes (autonomous judgements, comparative judgements) between-participants design were conducted. Study 1 addressed distributive justice and Study 2 addressed procedural justice. The dependent variable was teachers' legitimacy.

RESULTS

In both studies, situations perceived as just led to higher teachers' legitimacy than situations perceived as unjust. For the distributive injustice conditions, teachers' legitimacy was equally lower for autonomous judgement and comparative judgement conditions. For procedural injustice, teachers' legitimacy was lower when the peer was treated justly and the participant was treated unfairly, compared with the condition when the participants did not know how the teacher treated the peer.

CONCLUSIONS

We conclude that teachers' injustice affects teachers' legitimacy, but it does it differently according to the social comparisons involved and the type of justice involved. Moreover, these results highlight that social comparisons are an important psychological process and, therefore, they should be taken into account in models of justice.

The Effects of Procedural Justice Climate on Work Group Performance

The authors examined the effect of procedural justice climate, defined as a distinct group-level cognition about how the work group as a whole is treated, on work group performance in a sample of 34 work groups from two organizations. They hypothesized that the relationship between procedural justice climate and performance is indirect, operating through helping behavior. Group-level helping behavior fully mediated the relationship between procedural justice climate and perceived performance. However, the same results were not found when financial performance data were used as a measure of work group performance. Implications for the study’s findings are discussed.

Antecedents and Consequences of Fairness Perceptions in Personnel Selection

Drawing on Gilliland’s selection fairness framework, we examined antecedents and behavioral effects of applicant procedural fairness perceptions before, during, and after a personnel selection procedure using a six-wave longitudinal research design. Results showed that both perceived post-test fairness and pre-feedback fairness perceptions are related to job offer acceptance and job performance after 18 months, but not to job performance after 36 months. Pre-test and post-test procedural fairness perceptions were mainly related to formal characteristics and interpersonal treatment, whereas pre-feedback fairness perceptions were related to formal characteristics and explanations. The impact of fairness attributes of formal characteristics and interpersonal treatment diminished over time, whereas attributes of explanation were only associated with pre-feedback fairness. Results are discussed in terms of theoretical implications for fairness research and for hiring organizations.

Values and Organizational Justice

Reactions of full-time employees to reward-allocation decisions by managers that were based either on work performance or on seniority were surveyed in former East Germany and in the United Kingdom. Schwartz’s model of universal human values is predicted to moderate the perceived justice of these reward-allocation principles. It was found that self-enhancement versus self-transcendence is a more powerful moderator of justice perceptions compared with openness to change versus conservation values. The study demonstrates the usefulness of values research in explaining perceptions of justice and highlights the importance of values for justice theories.

The Psychology of Own Versus Others’ Treatment: Self-Oriented and Other-Oriented Effects on Perceptions of Procedural Justice

This article focuses on how people interpret their own versus others’ treatment. Two experiments investigate how perceived procedural justice is affected by procedures that are experienced personally versus those seen to have been experienced by others. The studies show that, at least under some conditions, the treatment of others is as potent a consideration in justice judgments as is one’s own treatment. These findings are contrasted with previous insights into the psychology of social justice in general and procedural justice in particular.

Perceived discrimination against immigrants in the workplace

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to examine how perceptions of organizational justice and social-focussed personal values influence perceived discrimination against immigrants in the workplace.

Design/methodology/approach

– A sample of 224 employees of a mental health clinic in Norway completed Schwartz’s Portrait Values Questionnaire that measures personal values, Colquitt’s Organizational Justice Scale, and scale measuring perceived discrimination against immigrant in the workplace.

Findings

– Perceived organizational justice and the social-focussed value universalism contributed significantly in explaining variance in perceived discrimination against immigrants in the workplace. Employees who scored low on perceived organizational justice scored high on perceived discrimination against immigrants, and employees who scored high on the value universalism scored high on perceived discrimination against immigrants in the workplace.

Research limitations/implications

– The cross-sectional design cannot determine causality. The direction of the relationship between the variables is founded on prevailing empirical and theoretical contributions in the field.

Practical implications

– Cultural diversity training programs should make employees aware of how their personal values and personal justice experiences influence their perceptions of discrimination against immigrants. Culturally diverse workplaces could benefit from recruiting employees who emphasize universalism.

Originality/value

– Co-workers’ perception of exclusion and discriminating behavior against immigrants in the workplace is critical in order to reduce such unjust treatment. There is limited research on factors that influence perceptions of discrimination against others.

The “Fairness Paradox” and “Small-Firm Growth Resistance Strategies”

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to examine and explore why “Small-Businesses” resist employing outside the immediate family and investigate the employee as an outsider and entrepreneurial resource.

Design/methodology/approach

– The authors review the literature on barriers to small-business growth concentrating on key empirical and theoretical studies. The authors use empirical data from the Federation of Small Business in which informants commented on growth and employing outside the family.

Findings

– The findings suggest that small business owners adopt a polemical stance, arguing that a barrage of employment regulations deters them from employing outsiders because doing so brings trouble in terms of costs such as insurance, taxes, paperwork, leave (maternity and paternity) entitlement, etc. They argue that employing from inside the family or ones peer group is much cheaper, convenient and less hassle. This ignores the entrepreneurial employee as a potential ingredient of growth and points to a paradox whereby the very values and emotions characterized by fairness of which of “smallness” and “familialness” is composed compound the issues of discrimination central to the debate.

Research limitations/implications

– The paper offer important insights for growth issues among small businesses and challenge the contemporary equilibrium in terms of small “family-orientated” business philosophy relating to employment practices. Ideologically, the entrepreneur is an “outsider” fighting the establishment, yet paradoxically, in a small-business context s/he becomes the establishment by employing outsiders. This results in the fairness vs unfairness paradox.

Originality/value

– The paper contributes to the existing knowledge and understanding on growth issues among small businesses by illuminating a paradoxical insider vs outsider tension.

Perceived Fairness of Pay: The Importance of Task versus Maintenance Inputs in Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong

This study compares East Asians' evaluations of task and maintenance inputs in reward allocation decisions and examines the effects that inequity in various types of inputs and rewards have on fairness judgements. Based on a sample of 587 employees from various organizations in Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea, we find that Hong Kong Chinese and South Korean employees are more likely to want their organizations and supervisors to emphasize maintenance inputs, while Japanese employees value task inputs in reward allocation. Results also show that there are significant country differences in fairness judgements associated with various types of inputs. For example, the positive relationship between pay level and perceived fairness of pay is significantly stronger when task contributions are high rather than low among Japanese employees but not among Hong Kong and South Korean employees. The concept of independent self-construal (similar to individualism at the societal level) seems to provide an adequate account of the country differences in choice of input preferences but not fairness judgements.

Supervisor conflict management, justice, and strain: multilevel relationships

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to test a multilevel model of the main and mediating effects of supervisor conflict management style (SCMS) climate and procedural justice (PJ) climate on employee strain. It is hypothesized that workgroup-level climate induced by SCMS can fall into four types: collaborative climate, yielding climate, forcing climate, or avoiding climate; that these group-level perceptions will have differential effects on employee strain, and will be mediated by PJ climate.

Design/methodology/approach

– Multilevel SEM was used to analyze data from 420 employees nested in 61 workgroups.

Findings

– Workgroups that perceived high supervisor collaborating climate reported lower sleep disturbance, job dissatisfaction, and action-taking cognitions. Workgroups that perceived high supervisor yielding climate and high supervisor forcing climate reported higher anxiety/depression, sleep disturbance, job dissatisfaction, and action-taking cognitions. Results supported a PJ climate mediation model when supervisors’ behavior was reported to be collaborative and yielding.

Research limitations/implications

– The cross-sectional research design places limitations on conclusions about causality; thus, longitudinal studies are recommended.

Practical implications

– Supervisor behavior in response to conflict may have far-reaching effects beyond those who are a party to the conflict. The more visible use of supervisor collaborative CMS may be beneficial.

Social implications

– The economic costs associated with workplace conflict may be reduced through the application of these findings.

Originality/value

– By applying multilevel theory and analysis, we extend workplace conflict theory.

Bridging corporate social responsibility and compassion at work

Purpose

– This study aims to examine how employees' perceptions of organizational actions, such as corporate social responsibility (CSR), affect their compassionate acts in organizations through employee perceptions of organizational justice and affective organizational commitment.

Design/methodology/approach

– The employees from 87 firms in South Korea were surveyed using a self-administered instrument for data collection. Out of 400 questionnaires, a total of 253 usable questionnaires were obtained after list-wise deletion, for a 63.3 percent response rate. The firms belong to a variety of industries (banking and financial services, manufacturing, hospitals, education, etc.).

Findings

– The results indicate that employees' perceptions of CSR positively relate to compassion at work through organizational justice perceptions (i.e. perceptions of distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice), and affective organizational commitment, in a sequential manner, in addition to their direct effects on compassion at work.

Originality/value

– This study sheds new light on both the compassion and the CSR literature due to its attempt to bridge the macro concept of CSR with micro research in compassion. This is, apparently, one of the first pieces of research in the management literature to specifically address compassion as a consequence of employees' CSR perception.

Justice Climate and Peer Justice Climate

We provide an empirical examination of peer justice climate, defined as team-level judgments of the fairness with which coworkers generally treat one another, and justice climate, defined as team-level judgments of the fairness with which the team is collectively treated by an authority figure. Based on previous theoretical work, we tested a hierarchical structural model determining that peer justice climate was best represented as three first-order factors, which combine into a single second-order dimension. We found a similar two-level structure for justice climate. We also found that the relationship between peer justice climate and team satisfaction was mediated by cooperative team process.

How perceptions of fairness can change

Research on organizational justice has focused almost exclusively on fairness at one point in time. This perspective severely limits our understanding because fairness perceptions can continually evolve as individuals encounter new information. We present a dynamic model of organizational justice in which we integrate current justice theories with research on sense-making and social cognition to describe the processes through which perceptions of fairness change. The model describes a cyclical process whereby individuals' cognitive processing and judgments about the fairness of an event are guided by their perceptions about the entity involved. In turn, event judgments alter the knowledge structure that underlies entity perceptions, which has implications for perception change. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Injustice for all or just for me? Social value orientation predicts responses to own versus other's procedures

In two experiments, the authors investigated how differences in social value orientation predict evaluations of procedures that were accorded to self and others. Proselfs versus prosocials were either granted or denied an opportunity to voice an opinion in a decision-making process and witnessed how someone else was either granted or denied such an opportunity. Consistent with the hypothesis, procedural evaluations of both proselfs and prosocials were influenced by own procedure when other was granted voice, but only proselfs were influenced by own procedure when other was denied voice. These findings were particularly attributable to prosocials' tendency to evaluate a situation where no-voice procedures are applied consistently between persons more positively than proselfs. It is concluded that proselfs are focused on procedural justice and injustice for self more than prosocials, whereas prosocials value equality in procedures more than proselfs-even when equality implies injustice for all.

A cross‐level study of procedural justice perceptions

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between supervisor‐perceived procedural justice and subordinate‐perceived procedural justice. The moderating roles of the subordinate‐perceived interactional justice and power‐distance value are also to be examined.

Design/methodology/approach

Survey data were obtained from 509 supervisor‐subordinate dyads in mainland China. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to test the research hypotheses.

Findings

Results revealed that: supervisor‐perceived procedural justice is positively related to subordinate‐perceived procedural justice; the direct relationship is stronger when the subordinate perceives higher rather than lower interactional justice from the supervisor; and the direct relationship is stronger when the subordinate holds a higher rather than lower power‐distance value.

Research limitations/implications

The data collected in the present study reside at two hierarchical levels, namely, the employee level and the supervisor level, and the sample size is relatively large. The results are thus less likely subject to common method bias. However, future longitudinal research will be helpful to lend stronger support for the hypothesized causal relationships.

Originality/value

The paper uses cognitive social learning theory in a social exchange context to explain the cross‐level relationship of procedural justice perceptions in organizations, and to identify its boundary conditions. Results support that fairness perceptions at a higher organizational level can be related to lower‐level perceptions along the organizational hierarchy.

Organizational and safety culture in Canadian intensive care units: relationship to size of intensive care unit and physician management model

PURPOSE

The objectives of this study are to describe organizational and safety culture in Canadian intensive care units (ICUs), to correlate culture with the number of beds and physician management model in each ICU, and to correlate organizational culture and safety culture.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

In this cross-sectional study, surveys of organizational and safety culture were administered to 2374 clinical staff in 23 Canadian tertiary care and community ICUs. For the 1285 completed surveys, scores were calculated for each of 34 domains. Average domain scores for each ICU were correlated with number of ICU beds and with intensivist vs nonintensivist management model. Domain scores for organizational culture were correlated with domain scores for safety culture.

RESULTS

Culture domain scores were generally favorable in all ICUs. There were moderately strong positive correlations between number of ICU beds and perceived effectiveness at recruiting/retaining physicians (r = 0.58; P < .01), relative technical quality of care (r = 0.66; P < .01), and medical director budgeting authority (r = 0.46; P = .03), and moderately strong negative correlations with frequency of events reported (r = -0.46; P = .03), and teamwork across hospital units (r = -0.51; P = .01). There were similar patterns for relationships with intensivist management. For most pairs of domains, there were weak correlations between organizational and safety culture.

CONCLUSION

Differences in perceptions between staff in larger and smaller ICUs highlight the importance of teamwork across units in larger ICUs.