Human Relations

Both organizational justice and behavioural ethics are concerned with questions of ‘right and wrong’ in the context of work organizations. Until recently they have developed largely independently of each other, choosing to focus on subtly different concerns, constructs and research questions. The last few years have, however, witnessed a significant growth in theoretical and empirical research integrating these closely related academic specialities. We review the organizational justice literature, illustrating the impact of behavioural ethics research on important fairness questions. We argue that organizational justice research is focused on four reoccurring issues: (i) why justice at work matters to individuals; (ii) how justice judgements are formed; (iii) the consequences of injustice; and (iv) the factors antecedent to justice perceptions. Current and future justice research has begun and will continue borrowing from the behavioural ethics literature in answering these questions.

We analyze business behavioral ethics in terms of bounded autonomy, namely the result of tensions between the countervailing motivations of reactance (tendencies that involve the freedom of behaving in certain ways as a right) versus deonance (tendencies that involve the appropriateness of behaving in certain ways as an obligation). We focus in particular on how the resolution of such tensions (i.e. establishment of a boundary between rights and duties—“free” behaviors versus “non-free” behaviors—in a state of dynamic equilibrium) can cause behavior to be seen as ethical by the person performing the behavior (the actor), but seen as unethical by impartial observers. That discrepancy comes from the actor’s assessment of the behavior in question as having either an inherent status (the type of behavior it is) or an instrumental status (what it does). This analysis leads us to a discussion of the following four types of situations involving unethical behavior: freedom expansion based on a behavior’s inherent status or on its instrumental status; and freedom contraction based on a behavior’s inherent status or on its instrumental status. We outline propositions consistent with those distinctions and conclude with theoretical implications.

We extend the deontic model of justice (Folger, 1998, 2001) by arguing that not all employees respond to third-party injustices by experiencing an eye-for-an-eye retributive response; rather, some employees respond in ways that are higher in moral acceptance (e.g. increasing turnover intentions, engaging in constructive resistance). We predict that the positive relationship between supervisor abuse of customers and organizational deviance is weaker when employees are high in moral identity. In contrast, we hypothesize that the relationships between supervisor abuse of customers and turnover intentions and constructive resistance are more strongly positive when employees are high in moral identity. Regression results from two field studies (N = 222 and N = 199, respectively) provide general support for our theoretical model.

The current study examines the role of ethical cognition as a psychological mechanism linking ethical leadership to employee engagement in specific discretionary workplace behaviors. Hypotheses are developed proposing that ethical leadership is associated with employees’ negative moral equity judgments of workplace deviance (a discretionary antisocial behavior) and positive moral equity judgments of organizational citizenship (a discretionary prosocial behavior). In addition, hypotheses propose that moral equity judgments are a key type of ethical cognition linking ethical leadership with employee behaviors. Hypotheses are tested in a cross-organizational sample of 190 supervisor–employee dyads. Results indicate that employees who work for ethical leaders tended to judge acts of workplace deviance as morally inequitable and acts of organizational citizenship as morally equitable. In turn, these judgments guided employee regulation of behavior, and mediated the relationships between ethical leadership and employee avoidance of antisocial conduct and engagement in prosocial behavior.

Theories that explain employees’ positive emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses to fair procedures rely on control and relational processes. In the present study, we build on these models, but reverse this perspective to examine when leaders provide voice opportunities in their interactions with employees. We argued that leaders may take care of employees’ perceived individual control needs (which influence their own outcomes) by granting them voice. However, this will be the case particularly when leaders perceive that this employee also wants to belong to the organization, because this makes it more likely that employees will use their voice in a way that does not hurt the organization’s interest. Support for this predicted interaction effect was found in a laboratory experiment and a multisource field study. This research is among the first to identify factors that influence whether leaders will be more likely to act fairly, thus integrating procedural justice processes in the leadership literature.

This article attempts to determine whether stretch goals disrupt organizations and, if so, how organizations minimize those disruptions. We consider how two different kinds of justice climates − interpersonal and informational − interact to influence employees’ unethical behavior and relationship conflicts in the face of stretch goals. The results from 117 departments (including a total of 351 employees and 117 managers) in six Chinese banks support our hypotheses that stretch goals foster unethical behavior and intensify relationship conflict among employees. Furthermore, we find that informational-justice climates greatly reduce the disruptive effect of stretch goals on unethical behavior, and we find that interpersonal-justice climates greatly reduce the disruptive effect of stretch goals on relationship conflict. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.