How do people judge fairness in supervisor and peer relationships? Another assessment of the dimensions of justice

Abstract

The ultimate goal of organizational justice research is to help create fairer workplaces. This goal may have been slowed by an inattention to the criteria that workers themselves use to ascertain what they believe is fair. Referred to as ‘justice rules’, these were originally determined by theoretical considerations and organized in four dimensions (distributive, procedural, interpersonal and informational justice). There have been few attempts to investigate how far these classical norms represent fairness experiences and concerns in modern workplaces, especially in the context of working with peers. In a person-centric study, we investigate which rules people use when judging the fairness of interactions with supervisors and peers. This allows us to identify 14 new justice rules that are not taken into account by traditional measures. When subjected to factor analysis in follow-up studies, the enlarged set of rules suggests a more parsimonious structure for organizational justice, with only three dimensions apiece for supervisor and peer justice. We term these factors relationship, task, and distributive justice. Furthermore, we find that the resulting model of justice rules is a good predictor of attitudes in relation to supervisors and peers and can provide additional insights into how to understand and manage justice.