Social influence and organizational justice in employee reactions to performance appraisals

Organizational justice research has found that fairness considerations are ubiquitous in organizational life and that if employees are provided with an opportunity to provide input or voice into procedures that lead to outcomes that affect them, their perceptions of fairness are enhanced. Research in organizational politics has found that employees often attempt to gain input through the use of dyadic social influence behavior or influence tactics. While organizational justice and organizational politics have separately informed human resource management, there have been few efforts to integrate the two areas. Previous efforts were inadequate because of their failure to integrate the major findings of the psychology of justice with organizational politics.The objective of this dissertation was to integrate organizational justice and organizational politics. The integration of these two areas was accomplished theoretically and empirically. A framework was presented that conceptualized the role of social influence on the fairness evaluation process. Following, a field study was used to test several of the relationships portrayed in the framework. Specifically, an examination was made of the effects of the use of influence tactics on employee perceptions of the fairness of the performance evaluation process.Primary questions addressed in the dissertation included: (1) What is the effect on employees' fairness perceptions from their use of upward influence tactics? (2) Do upward influence tactics represent an informal mechanism of voice that enhance the fairness perceptions of the performance evaluation process in a similar way as formal mechanisms of voice? The results of the study indicated that the use of influence tactics represented a mechanism of voice. Upward influence tactics were found to have similar fairness enhancing effects on perceptions of fairness that formal voice mechanisms have been found to have. The results of the study provide researchers with a integrative framework for examining organizational justice and politics and suggest the appropriateness of extending the concept of voice to include alternative means of voice such as influence tactics.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio

Organizational trust among job seekers : the role of information-seeking and reciprocation wariness

This study explores job seekers' information-seeking and pre-hire trust, and the role of reciprocation wariness in the development of pre-hire trust. Individuals seeking a job with a technology company (N = 192) reported their perceptions of the organization's website usability and perceived similarity to their recruiter, organizational trustworthiness and trust, and intent to accept a job offer. Wariness moderated the relationship between website usability perceptions and trustworthiness. Unexpectedly, the interaction was in the opposite direction of what we predicted. In addition, job seekers' perceived similarity to their recruiter related to trustworthiness, and trust related to intent to accept a job offer. Our findings suggest that to some extent, recruiting organizations can encourage trust perceptions in the pre-hire context

Leader–member exchange (LMX) and culture : a meta-analysis of correlates of LMX across 23 countries

This study extends leader–member exchange (LMX) research by meta-analyzing the role of national culture in moderating relationships between LMX and its correlates. Results based on 282 independent samples (N = 68,587) from 23 countries and controlling for extreme response style differences indicate that (a) relationships of LMX with organizational citizenship behavior, justice perceptions, job satisfaction, turnover intentions, and leader trust are stronger in horizontal-individualistic (e.g., Western) contexts than in vertical-collectivistic (e.g., Asian) contexts; and (b) national culture does not affect relationships of LMX with task performance, organizational commitment, and transformational leadership. These findings highlight that although members are universally sensitive to how their leaders treat them, members' responses in Asian contexts may also be influenced by collective interests and role-based obligations

Is the employee-organization relationship dying or thriving? A temporal meta-analysis

There is controversy concerning whether, in recent years, organizational failures to act benevolently toward employees have lessened employees’ social-exchange relationship (SER) with their work organization or whether, on the contrary, organizations’ more favorable treatment of employees has strengthened the SER. With samples of U.S. employees, we examined changes over the past 3 decades in three key elements of the SER: perceived organizational support (POS: 317 samples, including 121,469 individuals), leader–member exchange (LMX: 191 samples, including 216,975 individuals), and affective organizational commitment (383 samples, including 116,766 individuals). We considered both how the average levels changed over time and how the associations of these 3 elements with the antecedents of procedural and distributive justice and the consequences of in-role and extra-role performance have changed. We found that the average levels of indicators of the SER have remained steady except for an increase in POS. LMX and affective commitment show levels near neutral, and POS has increased to only a moderately positive level. In contrast, the relationships between these elements with distributive and procedural justice and extra-role performance remain substantial. These findings suggest that employees on average do not currently have strong exchange relationships with their work organization but remain ready to more fully engage based on perceived voluntary favorable treatment by the work organization and its representatives. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved

The biological bases of unfairness: Neuroimaging evidence for the distinctiveness of procedural and distributive justice

A classic debate in the organizational justice literature concerns the question of whether procedural justice and distributive justice are independent constructs. We investigate this question by using fMRI methods to examine brain activation patterns associated with procedural and distributive unfairness. We observed a clear dissociation of activation between these two forms of justice, and only a minimal amount of shared activation in the hypothesized regions. Specifically, unfair procedures evoked greater activation in parts of the brain related to social cognition, such as the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) and the superior temporal sulcus (STS), whereas unfair outcomes evoked greater activation in more emotional areas of the brain, such as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), anterior insula (AI) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). We interpret the findings as supporting the notion that the two forms of justice reflect distinct constructs, while recognizing that, as forms of justice, they are closely related nomologically.fMRI Neuroimaging Justice Procedural justice Distributive justice Fairness Unfairness Brain