The Missed Promotion: An Exercise Demonstrating the Importance of Organizational Justice

Abstract

Treating employees fairly produces many positive outcomes, but evidence suggests that managers’ efforts to be fair are often unsuccessful because they emphasize the wrong aspects of justice. Managers tend to emphasize distributive justice, though employees may be most concerned with procedural and interactional justice. Organizational justice theory offers a framework for correcting this problem and assisting managers in their efforts to be fair. To this end, the authors describe the Missed Promotion exercise, a two-person role-play for introducing students to organizational justice theory. It provides a way to have students experience the importance of organizational justice, while teaching them about the three dimensions of justice and why managers often fail to be perceived as fair. Although the Missed Promotion exercise is simple enough to be completed in a single class session with students of any level, it reliably produces realistic responses and experiences, which allows for a useful discussion of the role of organizational justice in managerial fairness.