Social influence and organizational justice in employee reactions to performance appraisals

Abstract

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