Two Studies on Participation In Decision-Making and Equity Among FAA Personnel

Abstract

This report contains two studies: (1) The Moderating Effect of Equity on the Relationship between Participation in Decision-Making and Job Satisfaction; and (2) Perceived Environmental Uncertainty and Participation in Decision-Making in the Prediction of Perceptions of Fairness of Personnel Decisions. In the first study, moderated multiple regression analyses on data collected from Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) air traffic controller specialists indicated that equity perceptions moderated the relationship between participation in decision-making and level of job satisfaction. Specifically, the correlation between participation in decision-making and job satisfaction scores was higher among subjects high in equity than those low in equity. These results suggest that when individuals perceived their pay, promotional opportunities, and performance ratings as being unfair, participation in decision-making may have had less effect on job satisfaction than when individuals perceived them as being fair. In general, the success of managerial efforts to improve job satisfaction by implementing participation in decision-making efforts may be limited when subordinates perceive their personal work situation as unfair. Extending research on the effects of participation in decision-making (PDM) and perceived environmental uncertainty (PEU) on job attitudes, the second study investigated the hypothesis that PDM and PEU scores would account for variance in perceptions of the levels of fairness in personnel decisions. As hypothesized, data collected from 357 FAA personnel indicated that perceptions of participation in decision-making and environmental uncertainty accounted for unique variance in perceptions of levels of fairness in personnel decisions. Although limited by the possibility of method variance, these data suggest the importance of information in the development of equity perceptions.