Does company fairness really matter?

Posted by Ricki Sharpe on November 19, 2007  
Filed Under Work Behaviour

Workers of all stripes, it is widely believed, assign a high priority to being treated fairly and respond positively to organisations that do so. Now new research suggests that in many instances this is not the case.

A report in the current issue of the Academy of Management Journal finds that workers with low self-esteem tend to regard organisational justice with indifference.

The researchers found a positive relationship between procedural justice and organisational commitment among people with high self-esteem but not among people with low self-esteem.

This finding is particularly important as low self-esteem may characterise as many as twenty to thirty percent of employees.

This study of organisations in flux suggests that procedural justice may not be as strong a glue as many companies count on it to be.

The paper seeks to apply to organisational justice the insights of a large body of research into a psychological phenomenon called self-verification.

Self-verification theory contends that, once people form their self-views, they strive to verify and preserve them. While this seems natural enough for self-views that are positive, it also posits self-verification applies equally to negative self-views.

In other words, people seek verification from others not only about their strengths but about their flaws, a quest that leads them to favour people — whether as wives or room mates or bosses — who confirm those flaws, even if unpleasantly.

The current research seeks to determine whether this phenomenon may lead people to dismiss a feature of work life that is universally lauded — namely, fairness. If fair treatment of employees implies high regard for them, one can reason that it will not be welcomed by people with low self-esteem.

The research sought to answer this question through a series of studies:

  1. In two companies that were in the midst of reorganisation, workers with high self-esteem expressed significantly greater commitment to the company when they perceived the restructuring as fair than when they saw it as unjust. In contrast, workers low in self-esteem tended to express about the same level of company commitment whether they thought the restructuring was handled fairly or not.
  2. In a public hospital undergoing a major cost-cutting initiative, employees with high self-esteem who said the initiative was carried out fairly had significantly less absenteeism in the ten months following the survey than those who felt that it was handled unfairly. No differences in absenteeism were shown for employees with low self-esteem, regardless whether they credited the hospital with fairness or not.
  3. In a survey of business students whose companies had recently imposed lay-offs, survivors were highly sensitive about organisational justice when they anticipated a future with their company and also had high-self esteem. Among workers with low self-esteem, however, procedural justice had little effect on organisational commitment, even if they anticipated a future with their firms.

Whatever the level of their self-esteem, workers want the organisation to see them as they are. The ability to do so transcends procedural justice as a means of building what matters most to companies nowadays, an engaged and committed workforce.

Several earlier studies have suggested the considerable gains organisations can realise through worker self-verification.

For example, it is through self-verification that work groups get the most value out of diversity. When group members had their unique attributes and perspectives verified, they felt recognised and understood. Such feelings emboldened them to offer creative ideas and insights they might otherwise have felt too inhibited to share.

As a result, among groups that achieve high levels of self-verification, diversity facilitated performance. In contrast, among groups that failed to achieve substantial self-verification, diversity undermined performance.

Reference

Wiesenfeld, B. M., Swann, Jr., W. B., Brockner, J. & Bartel, C. A. (2007). Is More Fairness Always Preferred? Self-Esteem Moderates Reactions to Procedural Justice. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 1235 - 1253.


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