Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.
Fairness perceptions are an important driver of employees’ attitudes and behaviours in organisations. Therefore, it is crucial for managers to understand how fairness perceptions are formed. Research has not addressed whether people choose different normative standards when making judgments of distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice in different types of work relationships. The objectives of this study were:to identify the norms that people typically choose to judge the justice of outcomes (distributive justice), procedures (procedural justice), treatment (interpersonal justice) and information provision (informational justice) at workto develop an instrument to measure individual tendencies to choose particular types of justice norms, as an individual difference. This will allow the researchers and other researchers to determine in how far variance in justice judgments is due to general individual preferences for particular norms, independent of the situationto explore and then test how the choice of fairness norms differs between different types of work relationships (in particular, between peer versus hierarchical relationships, and close and distant relationships) The central research question of this study was: which norms do people choose to judge the different aspects of fairness at work, and how is this influenced by the different types of work relationships people find themselves in? The results will be of interest to academics who are interested in the process of making justice judgments, and to organisational practitioners who need to understand how fairness judgments are made in order to be able to create fairness perceptions among their employees. Further information is available from the What's Fair for Whom at Work? Studying the Choice of Fairness Norms in Different Work Relationships ESRC End of Award web page.
Main Topics:
Study One is an exploratory recall study in which 62 working people were asked to think about critical fairness-related incidents from their own experience in the workplace, and then to fill in a questionnaire regarding this incident. The incidents concerned experiences of unfairness at work from distant or close managers or peers. Study Two is a questionnaire study that aimed to develop a measure of individual differences in preferences for fairness norms. A larger set of items developed by a group of experts was administered to 338 working people. The purpose of Study Three was to extend and generalise the findings from studies one and two. The researchers administered a questionnaire about fairness experiences with managers and peers to the alumni of a UK university (n=458). This study included several fairness norms, as well as measures of friendship and trust, and the individual difference measure that we developed about fairness preferences in Study Two.
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