Righting the wrong for third parties -- how monetary compensation, procedure changes and apologies restore justice for observers of injustice

People react negatively not only to injustices they personally endure but also to injustices that they observe as ystanders at work—and typically, people observe more injustices than they personally experience. It is therefore important to understand how organizations can restore observers’ perceptions of justice after an injustice has occurred. In our paper, we employ a policy capturing design o test and compare the restorative power of monetary compensation, procedure changes and apologies, alone and in combination, from the perspective of third parties. We extend revious research on remedies by including different degrees f compensation and procedural changes, by comparing the ffects of sincere versus insincere apologies and by including apologies from additional sources. The results indicate that monetary compensation, procedure changes, and incere apologies all have a significant and positive effect on how observers perceive the restoration of justice. in sincere apologies, on the other hand, have no significant effect on restoration for third parties. Procedural changes ere found to have the strongest remedial effects, a remedy arely included in previous research. One interpretation of his finding could be that observers of injustice prefer olutions that are not short sighted: changing procedures voids future injustices that could affect other people. We ound that combinations of remedies, such that the presence of a second remedy strengthens the effect of the first remedy, are particularly effective. Our findings regarding interactions underline the importance of studying and ministering remedies in conjunction with each other

Ethical Considerations and Change Recipients’ Reactions: ‘It’s Not All About Me’

An implicit assumption in most works on change recipient reactions is that employees are self-centred and driven by a utilitarian perspective. According to large parts of the organizational change literature, employees’ reactions to organizational change are mainly driven by observations around the question ‘what will happen to me?’ We analysed change recipients’ reactions to 26 large-scale planned change projects in a policing context on the basis of 23 in-depth interviews. Our data show that change recipients drew on observations with three foci (me, colleagues and organization) to assess change, making sense of change as multidimensional and mostly ambivalent in nature. In their assessment of organizational change, recipients care not only about their own personal outcomes, but go beyond self-interested concerns to show a genuine interest in the impact of change on their colleagues and organization. Meaningful engagement of employees in organizational change processes requires recognizing that reactions are not simply ‘all about me’. We add to the organizational change literature by introducing a behavioural ethics perspective on change recipients’ reactions highlighting an ethical orientation where moral motives that trigger change reactions get more attention than is common in the change management literature. Beyond the specifics of our study, we argue that the genuine concern of change recipients for the wellbeing of others, and the impact of the organizations’ activities on internal and external stakeholders, needs to be considered more systematically in research on organizational change

One justice or two? A model of reconciliation for normative justice theories and empirical research on organisational justice

Management scholars and social scientists investigate dynamics of subjective fairness perceptions in the workplace under the umbrella term “organizational justice.” Philosophers and ethicists, on the other hand, think of justice as a normative requirement in societal relationships with conflicting interests. Both ways of looking at justice have neither remained fully separated nor been clearly integrated. It seems that much could be gained and learned by more closely integrating the ethical and the empirical fields of justice. On the other hand, it may simply not be possible to bridge the divide between the subjective empirical and the normative prescriptive justice as both fields pose different questions and rely on different assumptions and methods. In this paper, we propose a “reconciliation” model, as a third way of considering justice in the workplace, taking into account normative and psychological issues pertaining to justice. Through applying a reconciliation model, we provide a new way of looking at the interconnections between justice philosophy and organizational justice that could advance future research in both fields. Our model also implies that justice researchers can and should be concerned with the moral implications of their own subject of researc