Fair Process Effect 1
Running head: FAIR PROCESS EFFECT
Humans Making Sense of Alarming Conditions:
Psychological Insight into the Fair Process Effect
Kees van den Bos
Utrecht University
Chapter published in 2015 in
R. S. Cropanzano & M. L. Ambrose (Eds.),
Oxford handbook of justice in work organizations.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Keywords: fair process effect; treatment fairness; human reactions; sense making; alarm system; informational value; organizational behavior; human resource management
Author Notes:
I thank Maureen Ambrose, Russell Cropanzano, and Liesbeth Hulst for their comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this chapter.
Address correspondence to Kees van den Bos, Department of Social Psychology, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 1, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands. E-mail: .
Abstract
This chapter examines the psychology of the fair process effect, which is defined as the positive effect that people's perceptions of experienced treatment fairness have on their subsequent reactions. The chapter argues that when people are confronted with potentially problematic events or personal uncertainty-provoking experiences, this signals to them that something alarming may be going on that warrants their attention. As a result, the individuals involved are likely to engage in psychological processes of trying to make sense of what is going on and what they should expect will be happening. Because perceived procedural fairness has important informational value for people, it follows that people are susceptible to issues of treatment fairness in many alarming or sense-making triggering situations. The current chapter describes thisalarm-system perspective on the psychology of the fair process effect and discusses implications of this perspective for our understanding of organizational behavior and human resource management.
Fair Process Effect 1
Humans Making Sense of Alarming Conditions:
Psychological Insight into the Fair Process Effect
In this chapter, I focus on the psychology of the fair process effect, the positive effect that people's perceptions of procedural fairness (also referred to in this chapter as experienced treatment fairness1)have on their subsequent reactions (Folger, Rosenfield, Grove, & Corkran, 1979; Van den Bos, 2005; Walker, LaTour, Lind, & Thibaut, 1974). A central outcome of the research that I will review in the chapter is that an important reason why this effect is so robust and so prevalent in many different situations is because the experience of fair treatment serves important functions in processes of sense-making. That is, when people are confronted with events such as economic problems, reorganization processes, potential lay-offs (Brockner, 2010), but also more general personal uncertainty-provoking experiences(Van den Bos, 2001a),this signals to them that something potentially alarming may be going on that warrants their attention (Van den Bos, Ham, Lind, Simonis, Van Essen, & Rijpkema, 2008). As a result, the individuals involved are likely to engage in sense-making and social appraisal processes in order to make sense of what is going on and what they should expect will be happening (Van den Bos & Lind, 2013; Weick, 1995).
Because perceived procedural fairness has important informational value for people (Hulst, Van den Bos, & Akkermans, 2013; Lind, 2001; Van den Bos, 2001b), it follows that people are susceptible to issues of treatment fairness in many alarming or sense-making triggering situations (Van den Bos & Lind, 2009), especially when they are interacting with supervisors, management, or other social authorities (Lind, 1995; Tyler & Lind, 1992; see also Weick, 1995). Therefore, information that conveys fair treatment by authorities or other important people will yield various types of positive reactions among the individuals involved, such as increased organizational commitment,job performance, conflict resolution,decision acceptance, and job satisfaction (Van den Bos, 2005). In contrast, information that indicates unfair treatment instigates all sorts of negative responses, such as increased retaliation, theft, work stress, overt or covert disobedience, and decreased mental and physical health(Folger & Cropanzano, 1998).
Thus, a central premise of the current chapter is that perceived procedural or treatment fairness fulfills important psychological functions for people trying to make sense of their worlds, especially when they are trying to manage potentially alarming situations in those worlds. Figure 1 illustrates this alarm-system perspective on the psychology of the fair process effect. In what follows in this chapter I will define the fair process effect and will give a briefoverview of instances where the effect has been found. I then will go on and discuss basic psychological insights into the fair process effect. The chapter will end by drawing some conclusions of these insights for our understanding of organizational behavior and human resource management.
The Fair Process Effect:
Instances of the Effect and Conceptualizing the Effect
In the organizational justice literature there continues to be some misunderstanding and ambiguity as to how the term "the fair process effect" should be understood (Van den Bos, 2005). It is important, therefore, to delineate how I think the term should be defined and what I mean with the term when discussing instances of the effect, basic psychological mechanisms underlying the effect, and implications of the effect for our understanding of organizational behavior and more general social behavior. This discussion will necessarily rely and build on what I said earlier about these issues in my earlier review of the fair process effect (see Van den Bos, 2005).
A review of the fair process effect should start with the 1974 experiment by Walker, LaTour, Lind, and Thibaut. This experiment was the first procedural justice study that revealed a fair process effect. The experiment investigated the effects of adversary and inquisitorial procedures on the reactions of disputants toward either a favorable or an unfavorable verdict in a simulated court trial. Adversary and inquisitorial procedures differ on multiple dimensions, but the key distinction that Thibaut and Walker were interested in is that adversary procedures allow people involved in court trials greater levels of control over the process used in the court trial than inquisitorial procedures do. Findings of the Walker et al. study indicated that defendants judged the way in which they had been treated to be more fair when they had experienced the adversary procedure than when they had been subjected to the inquisitorial procedure. These effects are interpreted to reflect that, compared to inquisitorial procedures, adversary procedures allow people greater levels of process control (Thibaut & Walker, 1975, 1978) and more opportunities to voice their opinions (Folger et al., 1979). More important for the current purposes is that the findings also revealed a fair process effect such that participants judged their verdict to be more fair and were more satisfied with the verdict in case of the fair (adversary) procedure as opposed to the unfair (inquisitorial) procedure.
Building on the Walker et al. (1974) findings, Folger and colleagues (1979) were the first to come up with the term "the fair process effect." Extending on Hirschman's (1970) conception of voice, Folger et al. re-interpreted the procedural justice findings presented by Thibaut and Walkercum suis, and suggested that getting the opportunity to present evidence supporting one's own case in a court trial has a strong positive effect on the defendant's reactions toward the verdict.Folger et al. (1979) tested their line of reasoning by manipulating whether participants in an experimental set-up either received or did not receive an opportunity to voice their opinions about how the experimenter should divide lottery tickets between participants themselves and the other participants. As predicted, findings revealed a fair process effect such that voice procedures resulted in higher ratings of overall satisfaction than no-voice procedures.
Following the pioneering studies by Walker et al. (1974) and Folger et al. (1979) as well as the groundbreaking review of the psychological literature on procedural justice by Lind and Tyler (1988), many positive reactions have been reported of employees who felt they had been treated in a fair way by their management or their organization. These positive reactions include higher commitment to organizations and institutions (Folger & Konovsky, 1989; Korsgaard, Schweiger, & Sapienza, 1995; McFarlin & Sweeney, 1992; Moorman, 1991), more extra-role citizenship behavior (Konovsky & Folger, 1991; Podsakoff & MacKenzie, 1993), greater likelihood of conflict prevention and resolution (Bobocel, Agar, Meyer, & Irving, 1998), better job performance (Lind, Kanfer, & Earley, 1990), more widespread acceptance of company policy (Greenberg, 1994; Lind, 1990) and supervisor directives (Huo, Smith, Tyler, & Lind, 1996), higher levels of job satisfaction (Folger & Cropanzano, 1998), and more positive emotional feelings (Weiss, Suckow, & Cropanzano, 1999). In contrast, when employees perceive that they have been treated in an unfair way they are more likely to leave their jobs (Alexander & Ruderman, 1987), are less likely to cooperate (Lind, 2001), show lower levels of morale and higher levels of work stress and overt and covert disobedience (Huo et al., 1996), are more likely to initiate lawsuits (Lind, Greenberg, Scott, & Welchans, 2000), and may even start behaving in anti-social ways (Greenberg, 1993, 1997; Greenberg & Lind, 2000).
In other social contexts than organizations the fair process effect as defined here yields reliable and important effects on human reactions as well. For example, the belief that one has been treated fairly by judges, the police, or other social authorities enhances acceptance of legal decisions (Lind, Kulik, Ambrose, & De Vera Park, 1993), obedience to laws (Tyler, 1990), more positive evaluations of public policies (Lind, 1990; Tyler, Rasinski, & McGraw, 1985), and more trust in government (Van den Bos & Van der Velden, in press), whereas the belief that one has been treated unfairly has been shown to prompt protest behavior (Vermunt, Wit, Van den Bos, & Lind, 1996) and recidivism among spouse abuse defendants (Paternoster, Brame, Bachman, & Sherman, 1997).Indeed, what makes the fair process effect so importantis that the effect has been shown on a wide variety of human responses (for overviews, see, e.g., Lind & Tyler, 1988; Van den Bos, 2005).
I want to emphasize explicitly that the definition of the fair process effectthat is used in this chapter is that the effect refers to the positive effect that people's perceptions of treatment fairness have on their subsequent reactions.Thus, treatment fairness is a term I use here to signify the fairness of how people are treated. This term refers not only (or primarily) to the perceived fairness of formal procedures, but also (or especially) to the fairness people experience in interactions with other persons. I am proposing, therefore, that the perceived fairness of interpersonal treatment is what is driving large parts of what has become known in the literature as the fair process effect.
Following my take on the fair treatment effect it is important to specify what I think researchers often mean when they refer to the concept of procedure. The terms "procedure" and "procedural justice" are derived from the law literature and especially from the 1975 work by social psychologist John Thibaut and law professor Lawrence Walker. These authors and their colleagues were inspired by the psychological differences they saw between different legal procedures, and in their pioneering procedural justice experiments they took these differences as starting point for their investigation of participants' reactions toward procedures that varied the amount of process control that participants experienced in simulated court trials. Thus, Thibaut and Walker (1975) combined their mutual interests in social psychology and law and as a result they placed their studies under the heading of "procedural justice" research. However, this should not be taken too literally, since these authors clearly saw their experiments as a first step toward understanding the psychology involved in fairness and justice issues (Thibaut & Walker, 1978) and were intrigued by the implication of their findings that how people are treated in courts of law can have strong impact on their reactions to judges' verdicts (Walker et al., 1974).
Following the pioneering research by Thibaut and Walker (1975, 1978),scientists have deepened our understanding of the psychological processes hinted upon in thisearlier work (e.g., Folger et al., 1979; Folger, 1986; Greenberg, 2000; Greenberg & Folger, 1983; Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Lind, 1992; Van den Bos & Lind, 2002) and rightfully noted that the psychological processes involved in the Thibaut and Walker simulations could be adequately expanded to incorporate how people react to fairness and justice in other contexts than legal settings. Most notably, the role of procedural justice in the workplace was recognized to be very important (Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter, & Ng, 2001; Greenberg, 2000; Greenberg & Folger, 1983; Moorman, 1991). Even more important for the current purposes, during the 1975-1985 advancement of research and theory on procedural justice it became clear that what by then had become known as procedural justice effects were really effects of how fairly people felt they had been treated in the particular context under investigation (for an overview, see, e.g., Lind & Tyler, 1988).
In correspondence with this latter observation, the fair process effect research that is reviewed in this chapter is about the effect of the fairness of the way in which people feel they have been treated in the workplace or elsewhere. Thus, "procedural fairness" and "procedural justice" as they are being used here, and as I think that John Thibaut really intended it to be, refer to the way people are treated. So, in essence, fair or unfair treatment in interpersonal and social interactions is the issue here. This is also the reason why in this chapter I equate the fair process effect with an effect of fair treatment. Indeed, it may be more accurate to refer to the "fair process effect" as the fair treatment effect.
It is important to note that this conception of procedural justice overlaps to some extent with a notion that was developed later in the organizational justice literature, the concept of "interactional justice" (see, e.g., Bies & Moag, 1986; Bies & Shapiro, 1987). One could argue that a danger of using the procedural justice label is that it may be a bit of a misnomer and that people may wrongfully misinterpret the concept to mean to refer to formal, law-like procedures. The interactional justice label has as an advantage that it clearly refers to the justice and fairness aspects of social interactions that are so important in understanding the majority of the fairness effects reported in the psychological literature.
The main disadvantage of "international justice," however, is that when, in addition to the two earlier developed notions of distributive and procedural justice, researchers start using this concept they have to redefine the concept of procedural justice. That is, because of the obvious overlap of interactional justice with informal procedural justice (Tyler & Bies, 1990), introducing the concept of interactional justice forces researchers to start redefining procedural justice in terms of formal decision-making procedures. In the modern organizational justice literature there is a strong tendency to do this. However, this formal aspect was never meant to be important in the work by the founders of procedural justice. On the contrary, they were really referring to the more informal way in which people were treated in decision-making processes. It is this latter conception, the fairness of informal treatment, that I think the literature should focus on (for a similar argument, see Tyler & Bies, 1990), and I will refer to this by means of the notions that were originally developed for these effects: procedural justice (Thibaut & Walker, 1975) and the fair process effect (Folger et al., 1979).
Thus, the term "fair process" in organizational justice should be used to refer primarily to the informal way in which people are treated in decision-making processes, and not (or not only) to formal procedures. Formal aspects of procedures may have a role in the fair process effect, but the fairness of the informal ways in which people are treated by other persons is what is really driving the large part of the effect. Therefore, treating the concepts of "procedural justice" and "the fair process effect" in formal ways, as opposed to informal ways, would be a major error.
I should emphasize that I am not stating that perceived procedural justice or treatment fairness should be equated with perceptions of distributive justice. Research has shown clearly that procedural justice or treatment fairness have quite different effects than distributive justice has (Lind & Tyler, 1988). Furthermore, it is often or typically the combined effect of procedural and distributive justice that yield precise and important insight into organizational behavior (Brockner, 2010; Brockner & Wiesenfeld, 1996).
I also would like to note that thus far there is not a good scale that always will reliably measure the fair process effect or will assess people's procedural or treatment fairness perceptions in valid ways. This noted, recent evidence suggests that the Moorman (1991) scale might be a very good scale to measure experienced procedural justice in organizations (Miller, Konopaske, & Byrne, 2012), especially when items are tailored to fit the organization where the study is conducted and also fit the employees' experiences accurately (Lind & Tyler, 1988). It would be important for the progress in organizational justice if future studies would come up with a reliable scale of the fair process effect as defined here.