The above comments, culled from the senior author’s notes from workplace interviews over the years, suggest that managers are implicitly aware of a connection between justice and status. The district manager suggested that he was attuned to distributive justice when expressing the need to be deserving of his prestigious title. The restaurant manager did not think she was violating procedural justice by failing to give voice in the scheduling process to a lower status person, although she would have given voice to a higher status person. Finally, the service manager was sensitive to satisfying interactional justice by explaining outcomes to his superiors but not to his subordinates.

Not surprisingly, scholars are also familiar with connections between justice (or fairness) perceptions and status. This is particularly evident among sociologists (e.g., McClendon, 1976), who have studied how positions in occupational status hierarchies dictate the shares of rewards to which individuals feel fairly entitled, and psychologists (e.g., Van Prooijen, Van den Bos, and Wilke, 2002), who have examined how people’s thoughts about status led them to be concerned with following fair procedures. Despite such disciplinary links – and in keeping with the general observation that “status occupies a rather minor place in the … organizational behavior literature” (Pearce, Ramirez, and Branyiczki, 2001, p. 155) – connections between justice and status noted in the literature are not fully developed. However, scattered studies suggest that justice and status are interrelated in complex ways. Based on the belief that there is much to be learned about both justice and status by developing a rapprochement between them, we review their interrelationship in the present chapter. To this end, we juxtapose the various theoretical perspectives that shed light on the psychological processes underlying these connections and we also examine several of the most promising research directions stemming from them.