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26 - Feeling the Heat

The Importance of Affect to Organizational Justice for Receivers, Actors, and Observers

from Part IV - Workplace Affect and Organizational, Social, and Cultural Processes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2020

By
Brent A. Scott  and
Jocelyn Alisa Dana-Lê
Edited by
Liu-Qin Yang ,
Russell Cropanzano ,
Catherine S. Daus  and
Vicente Martínez-Tur
Liu-Qin Yang
Affiliation:
Portland State University
Russell Cropanzano
Affiliation:
University of Colorado
Catherine S. Daus
Affiliation:
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Vicente Martínez-Tur
Affiliation:
Universitat de València, Spain
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Summary

Broadly, the literature on organizational justice is concerned with a key question that employees often ask themselves when evaluating events that occur at work: “Was that fair?” (Colquitt, 2012, p. 526). Decades of research on organizational justice have revealed that individuals assess fairness when evaluating a) the outcomes they receive, including whether they are equitable (distributive justice: Adams, 1965; Leventhal, 1976), b) the procedures used to determine those outcomes, including whether they are consistent, accurate, unbiased, correctable, and provide voice and input (procedural justice: Leventhal, 1980; Thibaut & Walker, 1975), c) the information conveyed by authority figures, including whether it is honest and detailed (informational justice: Bies & Moag, 1986; Greenberg, 1993), and d) the interpersonal treatment they receive during interactions, including whether it is respectful and polite (interpersonal justice: Bies & Moag, 1986; Greenberg, 1993). The answers they receive to these questions (i.e. how fair or unfair an event was) are critical, as greater perceptions of fairness have been consistently linked to key outcomes such as well-being, job attitudes, and various indicators of job performance (for a meta-analysis, see Colquitt, Scott, Rodell, Long, Zapata, Conlon, & Wesson, 2013).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Workplace Affect , pp. 350 - 362
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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