Group members judge fairness by how everyone, not just themselves, is treated

Evidence

Recent research on procedural justice climate provides evidence for our reasoning here (Colquitt, Noe, & Jackson, 2002; Mossholder, Bennett, & Martin, 1998; Naumann & Bennett, 2000; Yang, Mossholder, & Peng, 2007). It has been shown that the effects of justice are more powerful when all or most of the group members have been treated fairly, relative to the case when only one or a few members have been treated fairly (Naumann & Bennett, 2000). In addition, Liao and Rupp (2005) recently reported that mean levels of work group members’ individual justice perceptions predicted employee commitment and citizenship behavior beyond that explained by their unaggregated procedural justice perceptions. Thus, people’s support for and cooperation with the authority/group leader and their group is affected not only by perceptions of their own personal treatment but also by perceptions of how most other group members have been treated. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2343

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to organizational justice research on distributive/procedural fairness and to social identity frames for legitimacy.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: organizational leaders succeed or fail on collective, not individual, fairness reputations — fairness is a group-level public good.