Justice and Social Exchange

(Colquitt, Greenberg, & Zapata-Phelan, 2005)

Outlined four waves of organizational justice research: 1) distributive justice, dealing with the subjective process involved in judging equity and other allocation norms; 2) procedural justice, focusing on rules that foster a sense of process fairness; 3) interactional justice, dealing with interpersonal treatment; & 4) the integrative wave.

(Colquitt, Scott, Rodell, Long, Zapata, Conlon, & Wesson, 2013)

A meta-analytic test of social exchange and affect-based perspectives Procedural justice reflects the perceived fairness of decision-making processes and the degree to which they are consistent, accurate, unbiased, and open to voice and input. Distributive justice reflects the perceived fairness of decision outcomes, especially the degree to which outcomes are equitable. Interpersonal and informational justice reflect the perceived fairness of the enactment and implementation of decisions, with the former reflecting the respectfulness and propriety of communications and the latter reflecting the truthfulness and adequacy of explanations. With respect to social exchange theory, our results revealed that the significant relationships between justice and both task performance and citizenship behavior were mediated by indicators of social exchange quality (trust, organizational commitment, perceived organizational support, and leader-member exchange), though such mediation was not apparent for counterproductive behavior. The strength of those relationships did not vary according to whether the focus of the justice matched the target of the performance behavior, contrary to popular assumptions in the literature, or according to whether justice was referenced to a specific event or a more general entity. With respect to affect, our results showed that justice-performance relationships were mediated by positive and negative affect, with the relevant affect dimension varying across justice and performance variables. Main takeaway: you should look at affect and social exchange quality Such implications often revolve around redesigning formal policies to be more consistent, accurate, equitable, or correctable.

(Barsky, Kaplan, & Beal, 2011)

In contrast to traditional conceptualizations of organizational justice as representing isolated judgments stemming from a "cold" rational calculus, justice judgments are instead part of a "hot" and affectively laden appraisal process, emerging over time through the interplay of work and nonwork experiences as well as through emotions and moods. The authors' model argues that emotions is/are integral to the process of forming justice judgements, as appraisals of events inform both emotional reactions and justice judgments in a fast and reciprocal fashion, resulting in a phenomenological experience of bidirectionality or even simultaneity. We describe justice-related events as situations in which some external agent (e.g., supervisor, coworker, committee, etc.) acts in a manner that impacts an employee's goals. - integral and incidental emotion refers respectively to affective states that are either directly connected or not directly connected to a focal justice-related event. Incidental affect impacts the generation and nature of the justice judgment process.

(Hausknecht, Sturman, & Roberson, 2011)

Justice as a dynamic construct: Effects of individual trajectories on distal work outcomes The authors conducted longitudinal, confirmatory factor, and regression analyses. Findings also reveal that change in procedural justice perceptions affected distal work outcomes more strongly than any other justice dimension. Given our findings that justice trajectories influence employees' distal attitudes and intentions, managers may find it useful to consider employees' unique histories of perceived treatment. When doing attitude survey, don't just look at a single survey result. Consider the present results in combination with past results.

(Tyler & Lind, 1992)

Relational Model (group-oriented conceptualization of procedural justice) Focuses on factors that determine the legitimacy of authorities Bias suppression, benevolence, and interpersonal justice influence the degree to which individuals view their authorities as legitimate Central tenets of the relational model: i. "A good relationship with authorities promotes feelings of procedural fairness and this in turn leads on to feel valued by the group" ii. "This group-value belief is a potent determinant of various attitudes and behaviors, including judgments legitimacy and obedience to authority"

(Cropanzano & Mitchell, 2005)

Social exchange theory (SET) is one the most influential conceptual paradigms in organizational behavior. Despite its usefulness, theoretical ambiguities within SET remain. As a consequence, tests of the model, as well as its applications, tend to rely on an incompletely specified set of ideas. The authors suggested 3 foundational ideas of Social Exchange Theory: Rules and norms of exchange: Parties must abide by certain "rules" of exchange. Rules of exchange form a "normative definition of the situation that forms among or is adopted by the participants in an exchange relation" Rules and norms of exchange are "the guidelines" of exchange processes Resources being exchanged: Two-dimensional matrix: 1) resource's particularism (resource's worth varies based on its source); 2) resource's concreteness (how tangible or specific the resource is) Examples of a resource's particularism: Money is low in particularism; Love is highly particularistic Examples of a resource's concreteness: Services and goods are somewhat concrete; Less concrete resources provide symbolic benefit The less particularistic and the more concrete a benefit is, the more likely it is to be exchanged in a short-term, quid pro quo fashion (i.e. money) Benefits that are highly particularistic and symbolic are exchanged in a more open-ended manner (i.e. love) Social exchange relationships: Social exchange relationships evolve when employers "take care of employees," which thereby engenders beneficial consequences Social exchange relationship is a mediator or intervening variable: Advantageous and fair transactions between strong relationships, and these relationships produce effective work behavior and positive employee attitudes

(Colquitt, 2001)

The authors developed and validated a measure of organizational justice. Confirmatory factor analysis concluded that the best model included distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational. Outcomes such as leader evaluation, rule compliance, commitment, and helping behavior. It feels like he cherry-picked the items from pioneering work in each wave. The measures are all worded differently. They are written to represent the 4 dimensions. He kind of stacked the deck in his favor b/c they are written distinctly for each dimension. The questions (and directions) are extremely distinct. As in of course he would find 4 distinct factors

(Lavelle, Rupp, & Brockner, 2007)

The authors proposed the target similarity framework, which takes a multi-foci approach to studying justice. Employees form justice perceptions about multiple parties Second, we acknowledge that justice evaluations, made by employees about a particular party, will impact the level of social exchange between the employee and that party. Third, employees will react to felt justice and social exchange by directing their attitudes and behaviors toward the focal party. The multifoci model of organizational justice argues that it is necessary for research to explicitly specify the source of justice. Main Takeaway: it is important to look at each foci when looking at justice. In conclusion, we hope this review and our target similarity framework encourages researchers to continue the recent trend of integrating multifoci perspectives across relevant organizational behavior constructs to provide a more complete representation of the employee experience at work.

(Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter, & Ng, 2001)

Title: Justice at the millennium: a meta-analytic review of 25 years of organizational justice research Main Takeaway: - The results demonstrate the overall and unique relationships among distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice and several organizational outcomes (e.g., job satisfaction, organizational commitment, evaluation of authority, organizational citizenship behavior, withdrawal, performance). Definitions: - Distributive justice - fairness of outcome distributions or allocations (i.e. equity theory) - Procedural justice - fairness of the procedures used to determine outcome distributions or allocations (i.e. Are performance appraisals fair for everyone's pay?) - Interpersonal justice - degree to which people are treated with politeness, dignity, and respect by authorities - Informational justice - the explanations provided to people that convey information about why procedures were used in a certain way Distributive justice had high correlations with outcome satisfaction, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, trust, agent-referenced evaluation of authority, and withdrawal Distributive justice had moderate correlations with system-referenced evaluation of authority, OCBs-organization referenced (OCBOs), and negative reactions Distributive justice was weakly related to OCBs-individual referenced (OCBIs) and performance Procedural justice had high correlations with outcome satisfaction, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, trust, and agent-referenced evaluation of authority Procedural justice had moderate correlations with system-referenced evaluation of authority, OCBOs, withdrawal, negative reactions, and performance Procedural justice had weak correlations with OCBIs Interpersonal justice was strongly related to agent-referenced evaluation of authority and moderately related to job satisfaction, system-referenced evaluation of authority, OCBIs, and negative reactions Interpersonal justice was weakly related to outcome satisfaction, organizational commitment, withdrawal, and performance Informational justice was strongly related to trust, agent-referenced evaluation of authority, and system-referenced evaluation of authority, and was moderately related to outcome satisfaction, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, OCBIs, withdrawal, and negative reactions Informational justice was weakly related to OCBOs and performance