Interpersonal Fairness Research Articles

Frontline health professionals’ perceptions of their adaptive competences in service recovery

ABSTRACTThere is extensive research on service recovery from the customer’s perspective, but not the service professional’s viewpoint. This is surprising, as service professionals are responsible for service recovery that is co-created with the customer in the joint sphere. Thus, this study empirically tested a framework of the antecedents of frontline health professionals’ (FHPs) perceptions of their recovery performance, including cultural and emotional competences that help them to adapt to failures and interact fairly with customers. This framework includes the organisational recovery system that sets the parameters FHPs operate within; the focus of previous research. The context is hospitals in Qatar, which has a sophisticated healthcare system. The hypotheses were generated from a literature review and 10 depth interviews with FHPs, followed by empirical testing with a sample of 343 FHPs. The results suggest that FHPs’ cultural and emotional competences and recovery self-efficacy improve their self-perceived interpersonal fairness and recovery performance. Various human resource management strategies are proposed based on these findings.

How temporal and social comparisons in performance evaluation affect fairness perceptions

In the context of performance evaluations, temporal comparisons inform people how well they are doing relative to how they have performed in the past. Social comparisons inform people how well they are doing relative to others. The present research examined the effects of temporal and social comparisons on the fairness perceptions of those who receive the evaluations. In four studies using different methodologies, temporal evaluations were perceived as adhering more to principles of procedural and interpersonal fairness than social evaluations. The effects of temporal versus social evaluations on fairness perceptions were mediated by perceptions of receiving individualized treatment.

Comparative Desert Vs. Fairness

In the recent book The Geometry of Desert, Shelly Kagan explores, with a rare degree of precision, how best to cash out two fundamental and widely shared intuitions. The first intuition says that virtuous people deserve to be doing well, and that less virtuous (or vicious) people deserve to be doing less well – and thus, that it’s good (other things equal) if virtuous people are doing well and if less virtuous (or vicious) people are doing less well (or even badly). The second intuition says that the distribution of the satisfaction of people’s desert claims across persons matters: that it’s good (other things equal) if people’s desert claims are satisfied in accordance with the demands of interpersonal fairness. The former intuition states the basis of what Kagan calls ‘absolute desert’. The latter articulates the basis of what he calls ‘comparative desert’. I advance an internal critique of Kagan’s conception of comparative desert; I argue that it contravenes the demands of interpersonal fairness in the domain of desert, and so fails on its own terms.

Measuring fairness in franchisor-franchisee relationship: a confirmatory approach

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to develop, test and validate a measure of fairness in the context of franchisor-franchisee relationship and test for the dimensionality of fairness.Design/methodology/approachThe authors surveyed 300 franchisees of a large-scale franchisor in India. The authors employ confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to analyse the data.FindingsThe authors tested four models of the fairness construct through CFA using structural equation modelling. The three-factor corrected model of the fairness construct exhibits comparatively better goodness of fit indices as compared to the other correlated models of the fairness construct. It clears the threshold level of validity and reliability test. The findings of the study suggest that the factor structure of fairness is three-factor correlated model with aspects of procedural fairness and informational fairness getting subsumed into one construct.Research limitations/implicationsFactor structure of fairness construct differs with earlier empirical research findings with both interpersonal fairness and informational fairness subsuming into each other to form one construct.Practical implicationsThis measure can be utilized by franchisee managers to track perceptions of fairness among franchisees to manage the franchise relationship in a better way. Franchisees expect information sharing from the franchisor and not the representative of the franchisor.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to develop a valid and reliable measure of fairness construct in the context of franchise relationship. This study also identifies factor structure of fairness construct.

Occurrence of rating distortions and ratees’ fairness perceptions per raters’ mood and affect

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the occurrence of rating distortions under raters’ different mood conditions and at different levels of interpersonal affect of raters towards ratees, and further its association with ratees’ perceptions of distributive and interpersonal fairness. Design/methodology/approach For the scenario-based experiment, the study recruited 110 undergraduate students as participants. Of them, 22 raters appraised the video-taped buyer-seller negotiation performance of 88 ratees. Repeated measures analysis was employed to analyse data. Findings Results revealed that under different mood conditions (pleasant and sad) and at different levels of interpersonal affect towards ratees (high and low), raters distorted ratings (inflated and deflated, respectively). These rating distortions shaped ratees fairness perceptions in such a way that ratees who received inflated ratings due to raters’ pleasant mood and high interpersonal affect perceived more distributive and interpersonal fairness than ratees who received deflated ratings due to raters’ sad mood and low interpersonal affect. Originality/value The paper is a step towards integrating the affect infusion model with distributive and interpersonal fairness theory. This integration can be of value for enhancing our understanding of how rater-centric rating errors take place, which subsequently shape ratees’ fairness perceptions.

English

Many countries have adopted a taxpayer charter or equivalent, which governs the relationship between taxpayers and tax authorities. However, little is known about the extent to which these charters are constructed in accordance with widely accepted fairness dimensions, as well as the relative importance of taxpayer charter rights within each fairness dimension. This research investigates the Canadian taxpayer charter (the Taxpayer Bill of Rights) using a trio of fairness dimensions that are known to influence tax compliance and the tax assessment process: procedural fairness, interpersonal fairness, and informational fairness. Rights classified as interpersonal or informational fairness were significantly underweight relative to procedural fairness. Furthermore, taxpayers rated data privacy, tax authority’s accountability, and comprehensive communication of information as the most important aspects of their service relationship with the tax authority. Implications for tax policy makers and tax researchers are discussed. Key words: Fairness, tax compliance, charter.

The Roles of Organizational Politics and Fairness in the Relationship between Performance Management Systems and Trust

ABSTRACTOrganizational politics is ubiquitous in organizations. Yet to date, no prior research has investigated, in a systematic empirical manner, the mediating role of organizational politics in performance measurement systems. The primary purpose of this research is to investigate if perceptions of organizational politics mediate the relationships between performance measures and employees' trust in their superiors. As organizational politics may also affect employees' perceptions of fairness, a model is used to investigate (1) if performance measures affect organizational politics; (2) if organizational politics, in turn, affects procedural and interpersonal fairness; and (3) if fairness perceptions subsequently affect trust in superiors. Based on a sample of 104 responses, the partial least squares results indicate that organizational politics and fairness perceptions significantly mediate the nonfinancial performance measures and trust relationship. In contrast, the results indicate that the mediating effects of organizational politics and fairness on the relationship between financial performance measures and trust are generally insignificant.

Service fairness and IS continuance model in cloud computing

This study integrates service fairness into a post-acceptance model of information system continuance. This study added constructs based on Greenberg’s (1993) four-component taxonomy of organisational justice. The research model seeks to be useful in predicting post-acceptance satisfaction, which enhances continued usage of services together with a technological product. The results show that perceived usefulness and satisfaction influence continuance intention, as the post-acceptance model predicts. Three of the four distinct service fairness dimensions, systemic, configural and interpersonal fairness significantly enhanced post-acceptance satisfaction. However, the relationship between informational fairness and satisfaction was negative and significant.

The Power of Nice: Active Listening, Procedural and Intepersonal Fairness Perceptions and Prosocial and Antisocial Negotiation Behaviors

I invoke active listening and draw on models of procedural and interpersonal fairness perceptions, perceived organizational support, and organizational prosocial behaviors to articulate and test a model of negotiator willingness to engage in exploitative and prosocial negotiation behaviors. Specifically, active listening is predicted to affect the other party’s procedural and interpersonal fairness perceptions. These fairness perceptions are expected to be interpreted as signaling the extent to which the other party cares about one’s own well-being. Perceptions of the other party’s concern for one’s own well-being are predicted to be reciprocated as positive or negative concern for the other party. Finally, one’s own concern for the other party leads to exploitative and prosocial behaviors. All hypotheses except for the proposed link between procedural fairness perceptions and perceived other party support were supported.

Procedural Aspects of Tax Fairness: A Content Analysis of Canadian Tax Jurisprudence

ABSTRACT We undertake a directed content analysis of Canadian tax jurisprudence to analyze procedural, interpersonal, and informational fairness, and their respective criteria, in the tax context. To facilitate our analysis, we apply Colquitt's (2001) theoretical framework of fairness. Consistent with this framework, we find 198 cases that contain procedural fairness, 34 cases that contain interpersonal fairness, and 37 cases that contain informational fairness. Furthermore, we identify seven criteria of procedural tax fairness (accuracy, bias, consistency, compatibility, correctibility, representativeness, voice), three criteria of interpersonal tax fairness (respect, propriety, timeliness), and four criteria of informational tax fairness (justification, truthfulness, full disclosure, taxpayer technical competence). Implications for taxpayers, tax authorities, and tax researchers are discussed.

Is Interpersonal Fairness in the Doctor-Patient Relationship Associated with Long-Term Compliance in Patients with Schizophrenia?

Does an interpersonal fair treatment of patients with schizophrenia by their hospital psychiatrists improve patients’ intentions to take the antipsychotic medicine when leaving the hospital, long-term compliance and the perceived quality of medical treatment? 71 acutely ill in-patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and their doctors were included in this study. At hospital discharge patients received a questionnaire measuring their interpersonal fairness perceptions, the perceived quality of medical treatment, and intention to take the medicine. After 6 month we also measured patients’ long-term compliance. Data were analyzed by correlational analyses and path model. The results indicated that interpersonal fairness increased patients’ long-term compliance, which was mediated by the intention to take the medicine when leaving the hospital and the perceived quality of medical attendance. Thus, without consuming more time, an interpersonal fair treatment of patients by their doctors seems to have beneficial effects on patients’ perceived quality of medical care and long-term compliance. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are briefly discussed.

Adolescents' perceptions of institutional fairness: Relations with moral reasoning, emotions, and behavior

This article addresses how low-income urban adolescents view the fairness of different aspects of American society, including how wealth is distributed, the nature of legal constraints, and overall social opportunities and legitimacy. This research emerged from efforts to understand the moral and emotional nature of some adolescents' aggressive tendencies. Recently it has become clearer that aggression can serve many purposes and that, for some adolescents, aggression is a coherent though problematic response to larger familial, neighborhood, and institutional forces. Consequently, the authors focus on the connections between low-income adolescents' perceptions of institutional and interpersonal fairness, certain aggressive tendencies, and related emotion judgments. At the same time, relatively little is known about how low-income adolescents as a group perceive the fairness of wealth distribution and other broad aspects of American society. Consequently, a second important goal is to examine these adolescents' normative beliefs about institutional fairness at a time of growing financial and educational inequalities in the United States.

The importance of the supervisor for the mental health and work attitudes of Australian aged care nurses

The work attitudes and psychological well-being of aged care nurses are important factors impacting on the current and future capacity of the aged care workforce. Expanding our understanding of the ways in which the psychosocial work environment influences these outcomes is important in order to enable organizations to improve the management of human resources in this sector. Using survey data from a sample of 222 Australian aged care nurses, regression analyses were employed to test the relative impact of a range of psychosocial work environment variables derived from the demand-control-support (DCS) model and organizational justice variables on satisfaction, commitment, well-being, and depression. The expanded model predicted the work attitudes and well-being of aged care nurses, particularly the DCS components. Specifically, demand was related to depression, well-being, and job satisfaction, job control was related to depression, commitment, and job satisfaction, and supervisor support and interpersonal fairness were related to well-being. The contributions of informational and interpersonal justice, along with the main and interaction effects of supervisor support, highlight the centrality of the supervisor in addressing the impact of job demands on aged care nurses. Psychosocial variables have utility beyond predicting stress outcomes to the work attitudes of nurses in an aged care setting and thus present further avenues of research for the retention of nurses and improved patient care.

The intersection of justice and leadership: Testing a moderation model of contingent reward and interpersonal fairness

Summary Previous studies show the positive impact of contingent reward on satisfaction, but few have examined moderators of this effect. We theorized that interpersonal fairness – treating people with dignity and respect – moderates the contingent reward effect because it creates the situation in which followers can positively engage with contingent reward efforts from their leaders. We therefore examined how interpersonal fairness moderates the contingent reward effect, finding that the positive impact of contingent rewards is stronger as interpersonal fairness increases. The implication of the finding is that using contingent rewards may only be effective when implemented in a polite, respectful manner represented by interpersonal fairness.

Does Fairness Matter in the Context of Anger About Nuclear Energy Decision Making?

Several recent studies have questioned whether nonoutcome forms of fairness matter in decision-making situations where individuals feel strongly engaged by the issue at hand. This survey-based study focuses on perceptions about a decision-making process related to a proposal to expand a nuclear power plant in the U.S. Southeast. It finds that anger moderates the impacts of outcome and procedural fairness on willingness to accept a decision process as satisfactory and legitimate. The more anger a person said he or she would feel if a decision were to contradict that person's point of view, the more perceived outcome and procedural fairness mattered. The study also finds that interpersonal fairness is also moderated by anger, but in the opposite direction. Interpersonal fairness had less of an impact on willingness to accept a decision for those who said they would feel angry if the decision did not go their preferred way.

Fairness and Nanotechnology Concern

Research suggests that fairness perceptions matter to people who are asked to evaluate the acceptability of risks or risk management. Two separate national random surveys (n = 305 and n = 529) addressed Americans' concerns about and acceptance of nanotechnology risk management in the context of the degree to which they view scientists and risk managers as fair. The first survey investigated general views about scientists across four proposed dimensions of fairness (distributional, procedural, interpersonal, and informational). The results show that respondents who believe that the outcomes of scientific research tend to result in unequal benefits (distributional fairness) and that the procedures meant to protect the public from scientific research are biased (procedural fairness) were more concerned about nanotechnology. Believing scientists would treat them with respect (interpersonal fairness) and ensure access to information (informational fairness) were not significant predictors of concern. The second study also looked at these four dimensions of fairness but focused on perceptions of risk managers working for government, universities, and major companies. In addition to concern, it also examined acceptance of nanotechnology risk management. Study 2 results were similar to those of study 1 for concern; however, only perceived informational fairness consistently predicted acceptance of nanotechnology risk management. Overall, the study points to the value of considering fairness perceptions in the study of public perceptions of nanotechnology.

Peer Justice and Teamwork Process

We articulate a teamwork process model of peer justice, defined as a shared perception regarding how individuals who work together within the same unit and who do not have formal authority over each other judge the fairness with which they treat one another. We argue that unit-level judgments of procedural and interpersonal fairness may influence team process, characterized by such things as better communication, better coordination, and more mutual support for members. These team processes, in turn, promote higher team performance and unit-level citizenship behaviors. These ideas were tested among teams of business students working on a semester-long class project. Findings generally supported our theoretical model, attesting to the importance of peer justice. We also found that peer procedural justice strength influenced team outcome variables, including performance, through teamwork processes. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Elevation at work: The effects of leaders’ moral excellence

Leaders influence followers in many ways; one way is by eliciting positive emotions. In three studies we demonstrate that the nearly unstudied moral emotion of ‘elevation’ (a reaction to moral excellence) mediates the relations between leaders’ and their followers’ ethical behavior. Study 1 used scenarios manipulated experimentally; study 2 examined employees’ emotional responses to their leaders in a natural work setting; study 3 compared the effects of elevation to those of happiness, serenity, and positive affect. We found that leaders’ interpersonal fairness and self-sacrifice are powerful elicitors of elevation, and that this emotion fully mediates leaders’ influence on followers’ organizational citizenship behavior and affective organizational commitment. In the first study, we also observed a moderation effect of interpersonal fairness on self-sacrifice. Results underline the importance of positive moral emotions in organizations and shed light on the emotional process by which ethical leaders can foster positive organizational outcomes.

Police stress: the role of the psychological contract and perceptions of fairness

PurposeThe overall purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which breaches in psychological contracts and perceptions of organizational fairness account for variations in job stress experienced by operational police officers (as measured by psychological distress and employee performance), after controlling for the variance associated with more established job stressors (i.e. job demands, job control and social support).Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on data collected through a self‐report survey involving operational members of a large Australian police force (n=582).FindingsResults of hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicate that vast majority of explained variance in psychological distress and extra‐role performance is attributed to the additive effects of demand, control, and support. Furthermore, only one of the social exchange dimensions (interpersonal fairness) is predictive of either target variable.Research limitations/implicationsThe limitations that need to be taken into account are the cross‐sectional nature of the study design and the focus on a single police service.Practical implicationsDespite the generally weak support for the social exchange variables, there are signs that dimensions of justice (particularly interpersonal justice) should be included in future police‐stress investigations. The results also suggest that job characteristics such as job demand, job control and social support should be taken into account when developing strategies to prevent and/or reduce chronic job stress in policing services.Originality/valueThis is one of the first studies to examine the relationships between psychological contract breach, perceptions of fairness and police stress.

Procedural and interpersonal fairness moderate the relationship between outcome fairness and acceptance of merit pay

An organizational field study (N = 257) investigated employees' acceptance of a new merit pay system as involving an assessment of whether merit pay can make their earnings more fair, compared to their earnings in the current, seniority-based pay system. We expected that improvement of unfair earnings, and consequently acceptance of merit pay, is considered likely when existing procedures that produce these earnings are unfair, because merit pay improves such procedures. We also expected improvement of unfair earnings, and increased merit pay acceptance, to be likely when employees anticipate fair performance evaluation in a new system, as indicated by fair interpersonal treatment by their supervisor. Results showed that procedural and interpersonal fairness in the existing pay system indeed moderated the relationship between fairness of current outcomes and merit pay acceptance as predicted. Implications for the introduction of merit pay in organizations and for our understanding of the different roles of procedural and interpersonal fairness in outcome evaluations are discussed.