Leadership and Fairness: The state of the art.

Research in leadership effectiveness has paid less attention to the role of leader fairness than probably it should have. More recently, this has started to change. To capture this development, we review the empirical literature in leadership and fairness to define the field of leadership and fairness, to assess the state of the art, and to identify a research agenda for future efforts in the field. The review shows that leader distributive, procedural, and especially interactional fairness are positively associated with criteria of leadership effectiveness. More scarce and scattered evidence also suggests that fairness considerations help explain the effectiveness of other aspects of leadership, and that leader fairness and other aspects of leadership, or the leadership context, may interact in predicting leadership effectiveness. We conclude that future research should especially focus on interaction effects of leader fairness and other aspects of leadership, and on the processes mediating these effects

Self-esteem and outcome fairness: differential importance of procedural and outcome considerations.

Results of a survey of 222 detainees in Dutch jails and police stations showed that outcome-fairness judgments of individuals with high self-esteem were more strongly related to outcome considerations than to procedural considerations, whereas outcome-fairness judgments of individuals with low self-esteem were more strongly related to procedural considerations than to outcome considerations. It was proposed that these differences were due to the fact that (a) procedures more strongly express a social evaluation than outcomes and (b) individuals with low self-esteem are more concerned with social evaluations than individuals with high self-esteem. The implications of the results for other individual-differences factors and other populations than detainees are discussed