Fairness Enactment as Response to Higher Level Unfairness

Abstract

In contrast to the abundance of evidence on employee reactions to manager unfairness, we know very little about factors that predict whether managers will act fairly or not. This paper explores the effect of procedural unfairness that emanates from higher level managers on procedural fairness enactment at lower levels in the organization. We argue that lower level managers can enact both more and less fair procedures in response to higher level unfairness and that this depends on the extent to which lower level managers define the self in terms of their relation with their higher level manager (i.e., relationalinterdependent self-construal). We study both the moderating role of self-construal and how it is embedded in the physical environment of the organization. We pay particular attention to how spatial distance between higher and lower management affects selfconstrual at lower levels and -because of this relationship -the enactment of fair procedures within the organization. We conduct four studies (in two of which we study spatial distance as an antecedent for self-construal) and show that relatively high levels of relational-interdependent self-construal lead to assimilation in terms of procedural fairness enactment, whereas relatively low levels lead to contrast. FAIRNESS ENACTMENT AS RESPONSE TO HIGHER LEVEL UNFAIRNESS: THE ROLES OF SELF-CONSTRUAL AND SPATIAL DISTANCEIf one conclusion is warranted after four decades of research, it would be that procedural fairness matters (Colquitt et al., 2013). Employees care strongly about fairly enacted procedures (Rupp, 2011) and, in particular, the experience of unfair procedures generally motivates strong negative responses (Brockner, Tyler, & Cooper-Schneider, 1992; De Cremer, 2004). Indeed, procedural fairness has been shown to have substantial effects on virtually all important organizational outcomes (Cropanzano & Stein, 2009).Given these pervasive effects, it is surprising that research addressing factors that influence whether managers enact fair procedures (or not) is still in its infancy (Scott, Colquitt, & Paddock, 2009). For instance, there is some evidence that aspects of the manager-employee relationship and characteristics of individual managers predict whether procedures will be enacted fairly (Scott, Colquitt, & Zapata, 2007; Seppälä, Lipponen, Pirttilä-Backman, & Lipsanen, 2012). However, research has yet to go beyond the manager-employee dyad and take the broader context of the organization into account. In the present paper, we focus on procedural fairness enactment of lower level managers who interact with employees and consider whether the fairness of procedures enacted at higher levels influences fairness enactment down the line.We will argue that fairness enactment at lower levels may be influenced by higher level fairness in two different ways. First, lower level managers may assimilate higher level behavior, thus enacting procedures in an unfair manner after experiencing unfairness themselves. Alternatively, lower level manag...

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