When Equity Seems Unfair: The Role of Justice Enforceability in Temporary Team Coordination

Abstract

Temporary teams can accomplish tightly coupled complex work even without the shared experience that enables coordination in longstanding teams. To advance understanding of this process, I conducted an inductive study of temporary teams in four hospital emergency departments (EDs), and found that the teams in two EDs coordinated effectively, but the teams in the other two EDs did not. To theorize an explanation, I draw on the organizational justice literature and introduce the idea of justice enforceability, defined as the perception that authorities can act fairly, given the potential for other people to cheat. The team members’ perceptions of justice enforceability were focused on whether the distribution of work within and between teams was fair or could be cheated. When team members perceived that justice was enforceable, they were willing to engage in the extra-role behaviors that wove together their individual responsibilities. But when they perceived that cheating was possible, they avoided the extra-role behaviors that would have made them suckers for working hard while others cheated. Justice enforceability thus resolves a common tension in temporary teams, namely that the potential for uneven effort can undermine team coordination. In these ED teams, members only trusted that authorities could act fairly when the distribution of work was exactly equal; then team members felt they were all “in it together,” and each put in the work to coordinate as a team.