IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jobhdp/v114y2011i2p127-141.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The importance of contextual variables when judging fairness: An examination of counterfactual thoughts and fairness theory

Author

Listed:
  • Nicklin, Jessica M.
  • Greenbaum, Rebecca
  • McNall, Laurel A.
  • Folger, Robert
  • Williams, Kevin J.

Abstract

This research empirically examines the underlying mechanisms of fairness theory ([Folger and Cropanzano, 1998] and [Folger and Cropanzano, 2001]), namely counterfactual thought processes. Study 1 used a policy-capturing design to examine the relative importance of contextual variables in predicting counterfactual thoughts and fairness perceptions. Study 2 utilized a between-subjects design and asked participants to generate their own counterfactuals in response to an unfortunate event. Results of both studies showed that fairness perceptions are influenced by contextual variables (i.e., outcome severity, target knowledge and expertise, sin of commission vs. omission) and counterfactual thinking. Counterfactual thoughts partially mediated the effects of contextual variables and fairness perceptions in Study 1. Exploratory analyses from Study 3 revealed that the measurement of counterfactual thoughts (frequency vs. strength) may capture different underlying constructs. Implications are discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Nicklin, Jessica M. & Greenbaum, Rebecca & McNall, Laurel A. & Folger, Robert & Williams, Kevin J., 2011. "The importance of contextual variables when judging fairness: An examination of counterfactual thoughts and fairness theory," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 114(2), pages 127-141, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jobhdp:v:114:y:2011:i:2:p:127-141
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749-5978(10)00090-7
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Price, Kenneth H. & Lavelle, James J. & Henley, Amy B. & Cocchiara, Faye K. & Buchanan, F. Robert, 2006. "Judging the fairness of voice-based participation across multiple and interrelated stages of decision making," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 99(2), pages 212-226, March.
    2. Greenberg, Jerald, 1996. ""Forgive Me, I'm New": Three Experimental Demonstrations of the Effects of Attempts to Excuse Poor Performance," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 66(2), pages 165-178, May.
    3. Cohen-Charash, Yochi & Spector, Paul E., 2001. "The Role of Justice in Organizations: A Meta-Analysis," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 86(2), pages 278-321, November.
    4. repec:cup:judgdm:v:1:y:2006:i::p:98-107 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Martocchio, Joseph J. & Judge, Timothy A., 1994. "A Policy-Capturing Approach to Individuals' Decisions to Be Absent," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 57(3), pages 358-386, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Elizabeth Chinomona, 2017. "Antecedents of Employee Intention to Stay: A Study of Employees in Zimbabwean SMEs," Journal of Economics and Behavioral Studies, AMH International, vol. 9(5), pages 57-73.
    2. Anne M. Wilkins & Dana R. Hermanson & Jeffrey R. Cohen, 2016. "Do Compensation Committee Members Perceive Changing CEO Incentive Performance Targets Mid-Cycle to be Fair?," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 137(3), pages 623-638, September.
    3. Berthomé, Guy-El-Karim & Thomas, Alban, 2017. "A Context-based Procedure for Assessing Participatory Schemes in Environmental Planning," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 132(C), pages 113-123.
    4. Kaplan, Sigal & de Abreu e Silva, João & Di Ciommo, Floridea, 2014. "The relationship between young people׳s transit use and their perceptions of equity concepts in transit service provision," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 36(C), pages 79-87.
    5. Mpinganjira, Mercy & Maduku, Daniel K., 2019. "Ethics of mobile behavioral advertising: Antecedents and outcomes of perceived ethical value of advertised brands," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 95(C), pages 464-478.
    6. Meghan A. Thornton-Lugo & Deborah E. Rupp, 2021. "The Communication of Justice, Injustice, and Necessary Evils: An Empirical Examination," SAGE Open, , vol. 11(3), pages 21582440211, September.
    7. Russell S. Cropanzano & Sebastiano Massaro & William J. Becker, 2017. "Deontic Justice and Organizational Neuroscience," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 144(4), pages 733-754, September.
    8. Marion Fortin & Thierry Nadisic & Chris M. Bell & Jonathan R. Crawshaw & Russell Cropanzano, 2016. "Beyond the Particular and Universal: Dependence, Independence, and Interdependence of Context, Justice, and Ethics," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 137(4), pages 639-647, September.
    9. Ganegoda, Deshani B. & Folger, Robert, 2015. "Framing effects in justice perceptions: Prospect theory and counterfactuals," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 126(C), pages 27-36.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Rupp, Deborah E. & Shao, Ruodan & Jones, Kisha S. & Liao, Hui, 2014. "The utility of a multifoci approach to the study of organizational justice: A meta-analytic investigation into the consideration of normative rules, moral accountability, bandwidth-fidelity, and socia," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 123(2), pages 159-185.
    2. Chenot, David & Boutakidis, Ioakim & Benton, Amy D., 2014. "Equity and fairness perceptions in the child welfare workforce," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 400-406.
    3. Visschers, Vivianne H.M. & Siegrist, Michael, 2012. "Fair play in energy policy decisions: Procedural fairness, outcome fairness and acceptance of the decision to rebuild nuclear power plants," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 46(C), pages 292-300.
    4. Amy R. Ward & Mor Armony, 2013. "Blind Fair Routing in Large-Scale Service Systems with Heterogeneous Customers and Servers," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 61(1), pages 228-243, February.
    5. Amar Fall & Fatéma Safy-Godineau & David Carassus, 2018. "Perceptions de justice organisationnelle dans les collectivités locales : quels impacts sur le bien-être psychologique au travail et sur l’intention de quitter des agents ?," Post-Print hal-02142237, HAL.
    6. Thuy-Van Tran & Sinikka Lepistö & Janne Järvinen, 2021. "The relationship between subjectivity in managerial performance evaluation and the three dimensions of justice perception," Journal of Management Control: Zeitschrift für Planung und Unternehmenssteuerung, Springer, vol. 32(3), pages 369-399, September.
    7. Alpenberg, Jan & Paul Scarbrough, D., 2018. "Trust and control in changing production environments," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 88(C), pages 527-534.
    8. Dodgson, Mary Kate & Agoglia, Christopher P. & Bennett, G. Bradley, 2021. "The influence of relationship partners on client managers’ negotiation positions," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 92(C).
    9. Pujol-Cols, Lucas J. & Lazzaro-Salazar, Mariana, 2018. "Psychosocial risks and job satisfaction in argentinian scholars: exploring the moderating role of work engagement," Nülan. Deposited Documents 2966, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Sociales, Centro de Documentación.
    10. Stephanie Hastings & Joan Finegan, 2011. "The Role of Ethical Ideology in Reactions to Injustice," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 100(4), pages 689-703, June.
    11. Hakan Yalçın & Yeliz Yalçın, 2022. "A Meta Analysis of the Relationship between Organizational Justice and Job Satisfaction: The Case of Turkey," Istanbul Business Research, Istanbul University Business School, vol. 51(2), pages 417-432, November.
    12. Turel, Ofir & Connelly, Catherine E., 2013. "Too busy to help: Antecedents and outcomes of interactional justice in web-based service encounters," International Journal of Information Management, Elsevier, vol. 33(4), pages 674-683.
    13. Liebig, Stefan & Schupp, Jürgen, 2008. "Leistungs- oder Bedarfsgerechtigkeit? Über einen normativen Zielkonflikt des Wohlfahrtsstaats und seiner Bedeutung für die Bewertung des eigenen Erwerbseinkommens," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 59(1), pages 7-30.
    14. van Dijke, Marius & Wildschut, Tim & Leunissen, Joost M. & Sedikides, Constantine, 2015. "Nostalgia buffers the negative impact of low procedural justice on cooperation," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 127(C), pages 15-29.
    15. Tae-Soo Ha & Kuk-Kyoung Moon, 2023. "Distributive Justice, Goal Clarity, and Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Moderating Role of Transactional and Transformational Leadership," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(9), pages 1-20, April.
    16. Lude, Maximilian & Prügl, Reinhard, 2021. "Experimental studies in family business research," Journal of Family Business Strategy, Elsevier, vol. 12(1).
    17. Leong Weng, Lee & Muhammad Madi bin, Abdullah, 2019. "Organizational Justice and Employee Deviance among Emergency Services Personnel in Malaysia," Journal of Contemporary Research in Business, Economics and Finance, Michael Laurence, vol. 1(4), pages 62-73.
    18. Suk-Kyu Kim & Yunduk Jeong, 2021. "Developing the Healthy and Competitive Organization in the Sports Environment: Focused on the Relationships between Organizational Justice, Empowerment and Job Performance," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(17), pages 1-15, August.
    19. Ayesha Shahid & Qasim Ali Nisar & Muhammad Azeem & Waseem Ul Hameed & Muhammad Sajjad Hussain, 2018. "Moderating Role of Organizational Justice between Emotional Exhaustion and Job-Related Outcomes," Pakistan Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, International Research Alliance for Sustainable Development (iRASD), vol. 6(2), pages :205-220, June.
    20. Gur, Yonatan & Iancu, Dan & Warnes, Xavier, 2020. "Value Loss in Allocation Systems with Provider Guarantees," Research Papers 3813, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jobhdp:v:114:y:2011:i:2:p:127-141. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/obhdp .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.