Category Archives: Fairness

When It Comes to Employee Health, More than an ‘Apple a Day’ is Needed (IO Psychology)

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 Topic: Health & Safety, Organizational Justice, Fairness, Burnout, Stress
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (2012)
Article: Perceived Unfairness and Employee Health: A Meta-Analytic Integration
Authors: Robbins, Jordan M.; Ford, Michael T.; Tetrick, Lois E.
Reviewed By: Lauren A. Wood, M.S.

Practitioners and employers alike have expressed concern around the effects of poor employee heath. When employees are not well, the organization can not only incurs costs due to direct medical expenses, but can also pay for poor employee health in the form of absenteeism, decreased productivity and moral, and even turnover.

Recent research has linked employee perceptions of organizational unfairness to employee health. There are four ways in which perceptions of unfairness are thought to be experienced. These are through feelings of distributive injustice (i.e., fairness of outcomes of decisions), procedural injustice (i.e., fairness of the process of the decisions), interactional injustice (i.e., fairness of the exchanges between individuals in the organization), and psychological contract breach (i.e., failure of the organization to live up to the expectations of the employee).

In general, perceived organizational unfairness was found to be associated with poor employee health indicators such as mental health conditions, physical health conditions, and number of absences. Moreover, unfairness was most strongly related to more proximal health indicators such as employee feelings of burnout, negative mood, and job related stress.

Additionally, the four types of unfairness were related to different health related indicators. For instance, procedural justice was more strongly related to physical health problem, while distributive justice was more predictive of mental health issues. Psychological contract breach was most strongly associated with employee perceptions of burnout. Of the four, interactional justice was the least predictive of the health indicators.

What can be done to promote employee health and well-being in the workplace?Well, one good thing is that perceptions of fairness are malleable aspects of the workplace, meaning that organizations have a great deal of control managing fairness (and unfairness) perceptions. To increase feeling of distributive justice, organizations should strive to make policies with outcomes that are the same for all employees regardless of gender, race, and tenure. While, increasing perceptions of procedural justice can be accomplished by insuring that decision-making processes treat all employees equally. Finally, to increase perceptions of a sturdy psychological contract, openly and clearly communicate to employees, provide them with information, direction, and support in times of change, and treat employees with respect.

Robbins, J. M., Ford, M. T., & Tetrick, L. E. (2012). Perceived unfairness and employee health: A meta-analytic integration. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97, 235-272. doi: 10.1037/a0025408

source for picture: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/Fruit_g104-Fresh_Apple_p36862.html

Distracted Interviewing: The Case of Facial Scars (IO Psychology)

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Topic: Interviewing, Fairness
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (MAR 2012)
Article: Discrimination Against Facially Stigmatized Applicants in Interviews:
An Eye-Tracking and Face-to-Face Investigation
Authors: J.M. Madera, M.R. Hebl
Reviewed By: Ben Sher

It’s easy to imagine reasons why a job interviewer might be distracted: Workplace politics, trouble at home, unnecessarily detailed fantasies of winning the lottery, March Madness. But according to troubling new research by Madera and Hebl (2012), we can add one more thing to that list. If the person interviewing for the job has a facial scar, it could be enough to distract the interviewer and cause negative outcomes.

So how did they figure that out? The researchers conducted two experiments. The first experiment simulated job interviews by asking participants to look at a picture of an applicant while listening to a recording of an interview. Sometimes the applicant had a distinct facial scar and sometimes the applicant did not. Using high-tech eye-tracking equipment, the researchers found that when a job applicant had a facial scar, the participants spent more time looking at it then other parts of the face.

Well that doesn’t seem so surprising, right? But what happened next really stood out. Participants who were distracted by the scar recalled fewer facts about the applicant. When asked to rate the job applicants, remembering fewer facts led to lower ratings. Now you can see the problem.

To strengthen their case, the researchers repeated a similar study with participants who had managerial and interviewing experience. This time they used actors to play the role of job applicants, and applied an artificial facial scar in half of the trials. Again, the results were clear: When applicants had facial scars, their interviewers remembered fewer facts and provided lower ratings.

What does this mean? The authors note that distractions naturally compromise the integrity of job interviews, especially when these distractions lead to bias. For those of us who do conduct interviews, the authors discuss using structured interviews and careful note-taking as possible ways to remain as unbiased and factual as possible. They also add that sometimes mere awareness of possible sources of bias is the best way to avoid unfair outcomes.

Madera, J.M. & Hebl, M.R. (2012). Discrimination Against Facially Stigmatized
Applicants in Interviews: An Eye-Tracking and Face-to-Face Investigation. Journal of
Applied Psychology, 97(2), 317-330.

human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management

Are cognitive ability tests insulting your applicants? (IO Psychology)

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Topic: Organizational Justice, Fairness, Interviewing, Assessment, Selection
Publication: Personnel Psychology (WINTER 2011)
Article: Status and organizational entry: How organizational and individual status affect justice perceptions of hiring systems
Authors: Sumanth, J. J., & Cable, D. M.
Reviewed by: Alexandra Rechlin

It is well known in the field of IO psychology that cognitive ability tests are very predictive of employee performance.  However, applicants often see them as unfair and do not like taking them; more informal and much less valid methods (like informal interviews) tend to be preferred by applicants. In this study, Sumanth and Cable (2011) investigated the effect that the status of the organization and the career status of the applicant would have on applicants’ perceptions of the selection system’s fairness.

In this quasi-experimental study, the authors tested their hypotheses with two samples of adults (one of MBA alumni in the United States, one of executives in the United Kingdom). All participants were told that the hiring organization would use behavioral interviews, and half of the participants were told that they would also need to complete a cognitive ability test.

Organizational status is the reputation of an organization; a high-status organization (e.g., Google) is seen as being very reputable and prestigious. High-status organizations tend to be known for the rigor of their selection systems. The authors found that when low-status organizations (as opposed to high-status organizations) used cognitive ability tests as part of their selection system, applicants were less likely to view the organization attractively.

Individual career status refers to one’s beliefs about his or her career accomplishments and status (i.e., respect, prominence) within and outside of an organization. It is plausible that applicants with high status might be insulted by having to take a cognitive ability test when applying for a job; for example, they may think that their accomplishments should speak for themselves. Procedural justice is the fairness of the procedures used to make decisions. The authors found that when an individual’s status was high and cognitive ability tests were included, that person was more likely than low-status individuals to have lower perceptions of procedural justice. In other words, the process was seen as unfair. High-status individuals also were more insulted by the inclusion of a cognitive ability test.

These results indicate that even though cognitive ability tests are highly valid, they may repel high-status applicants who may see the process as unfair and insulting. My recommendation based on these findings would be to make it clear to applicants why cognitive ability tests are being used (i.e., their high validity) and that the exact same procedure will be used for all applicants.

Sumanth, J. J., & Cable, D. M. (2011). Status and organizational entry: How organizational and individual status affect justice perceptions of hiring systems. Personnel Psychology, 64, 963-1000. doi: 10.1111/j.1744-6570.2011.01233.x

human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management


source for picture: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/Business_People_g201-Businessman_Holding_Hands_Up_p65923.html

 

That Seems Fair: The Impact of Changing Justice Perceptions over Time (IO Psychology)

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Topic: Fairness
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (JUL 2011)
Article: Justice as a Dynamic Construct: Effects of Individual Trajectories on Distal Work Outcomes
Authors: Hausknecht, J. P., Sturman, M. C., & Roberson, Q. M.
Reviewed By: Thaddeus Rada

Organizational justice continues to play a prominent role in the science and practice of IO psychology. Many readers are probably familiar with some of the basic types of organizational justice, such as procedural, interactional, and distributive justice. However, although much research on justice (and injustice) in organizations has been conducted, the interactive effect of time and justice perceptions on important employee outcomes has not been addressed. In a recent paper, John Hausknecht and colleagues begin to address this gap in the literature.

The importance of understanding the interaction of justice perceptions with time can be understood with an example used by the authors of the current article. If an organization is interested in understanding the relationship between justice perceptions and some outcome, such as turnover intentions, measuring justice perceptions at only one point in time misses out on crucial information that measurement at multiple time points can give us. Two employees may report identical justice perceptions at the present time, but if one employee’s perceptions were very high six months ago, while the other employee’s were very low, the implications of this difference are obviously important. Despite their equivalent levels of current justice perceptions, the first employee may be substantially more likely to leave the organization, since their perceptions have decreased a great deal, which the other employee’s perceptions have increased.

Utilizing a sample of over 500 employees, the authors found support for all three of their hypotheses: namely, that employees who reported a positive justice trend were more satisfied, more committed to the organization, and likely to have lower turnover intentions, relative to employees that reported a negative justice trend over time. This research highlights the important role that time can play in our measurement and assessment of justice perceptions (and other constructs more generally). Practitioners might take findings such as these into account when conducting assessments in organizations, by obtaining measurements at multiple time periods in order to gain an understanding of how trends and changes in the levels of variables impacts important organizational outcomes.

Hausknecht, J. P., Sturman, M. C., & Roberson, Q. M. (2011). Justice as a dynamic construct: Effects of individual trajectories on distal work outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96, 872-880.

human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management


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What’s the Time? The Role of Temporal Perspective in Justice Concerns (Human Resource Management)

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Topic: Fairness, Human Resource Management
Publication: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (SEP 2011)
Article: Seeing the “Forest” or the “Trees” of Organizational Justice: Effects of Temporal Perspective on Employee Concerns about Unfair Treatment at Work
Authors: Cojuharenco, I., Patient, D., & Bashshur, M. R.
Reviewed By: Thaddeus Rada

Concerns about employee’s perceptions of organizational justice have been a point of emphasis for practitioners working in IO psychology and human resource management in recent years. Organizational justice is typically divided into several types, including interactional, procedural, and distributive justice, but the same basic concept underlies them all: the concern that employees have for being treated fairly.

Although previous work has evaluated a number of influences and outcomes associated with organizational justice, relatively little attention has been paid to the role that time may play in organizational justice issues. As such, a recent series of studies by Cojuharenco and colleagues evaluated this relationship. Specifically, they assessed the impact that temporal perspectives (whether someone is thinking of how they feel currently, versus how they felt in the past, etc.) play of employee’s perceptions of justice. Overall, the authors found that past-focused individuals exhibited greater concern over unfair treatment by others (interpersonal justice), while future-focused individuals exhibited greater concern over unfair outcomes (distributive justice).

One explanation for this phenomenon may be that people have more opportunities to “smooth the waters” with people that they have a procedural justice-related issue with, while the injustice associated with a distributive justice-related issue usually remains unchanged over time. Whatever the reason, it is worth remembering that time can have an important impact on the relevance of different types of injustice, and organizations would be well-advised to consider the types of justice that are most likely to be important to employees in a given situation.

Cojuharenco, I., Patient, D., & Bashshur, M. R. (2011). Seeing the “forest” or the “trees” of organizational justice: Effect of temporal perspective on employee concerns about unfair treatment at work. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 116, 17-31.

human resource management,organizational industrial psychology, organizational management

Do HRM Practices Lead to Satisfaction? Depends on Employee Entitlement

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Topic: Fairness, Strategic HR, Job Satisfaction
Publication: Journal of Business and Psychology (MAR 2011)
Article: Trait Entitlement and Perceived Favorability of Human Resource Management Practices in the Prediction of Job Satisfaction
Authors: Z. S. Byrne, B. K. Miller, V. E. Pitts
Reviewed By: Lauren A. Wood

The use of human resource management (HRM) practices has gained popularity within organizations due to their perceived success as a competitive advantage for attracting and retaining the most qualified individuals. Past research suggests that job satisfaction is a key outcome in this relationship. Specifically, favorable perceptions of the organization’s HRM practices tend to increase employee perceptions of job satisfaction.

However, this statement should not be used to blanket all employees—job satisfaction theories suggest that an employee’s perceptions of job satisfaction results from an appraisal of what others are receiving from the company vs. what he or she is getting from the company. Here, an individual difference in equity sensitivity may come into play. Equity sensitivity concerns the degree to which people vary on their level of entitlement in the workplace (benevolent or having a lower need for rewards compared to coworkers, equity sensitive or desiring an equal amount of rewards, entitled or preferring more awards than coworkers). The authors of the current study suggest that the favorability of HRM practices—job satisfaction relationship will be moderated by each employee’s degree of entitlement.

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The Relationship Between Weight and Salary: Bad News For All Kinds of People

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Topic: Fairness, Gender, Selection
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (JAN 2011)
Article: When It Comes to Pay, Do the Thin Win? The Effect of Weight on Pay for Men and Women
Authors: T.A. Judge, D.M. Cable
Reviewed By: Ben Sher

Does career success have anything to do with what you look like?  According to a recent study by Judge and Cable (2011), the answer is yes. 

From the same people who explained that height may influence salary (Judge & Cable, 2004), now it seems weight can also influence salary.  Drawing from cultivation theory, or the idea that people are slowly drawn to accept social norms promoted by the media, they say it literally pays to be the “ideal” weight. 

So what exactly is the “ideal” weight?  Not surprisingly, the answer is different for men and women.  The authors say underweight men are actually punished with smaller salaries, presumably because they have violated gender-role norms by being too skinny.  Men are paid more with increased weight, up to the point of obesity, when salaries start to gradually decline.  For women, a very different pattern emerged.  Underweight women had the highest salaries, and salaries decreased with additional weight gain. 

But not all weight gain is equal.  In one study, the salary decrease between average versus underweight women was twice the decrease between average weight women and overweight women.  According to the researchers, this is because the media has long been portraying increasingly thinner women as being ideally attractive, and the workplace has discriminated accordingly.  Once women violate this ideal and become average weight, they may already be seen as “letting themselves go” so any further weight gain isn’t as detrimental.  

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Is Bad Behavior from an Employee the Consequence of an Unfulfilled Organizational Promise?

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Topic: Counter-Productive Work Behavior, Fairness, Trust, Workplace Deviance
Publication: Journal of Business and Psychology (WINTER 2010)
Article: Psychological contracts and counterproductive work behaviors: employee responses to transactional and relational breach
Authors: J.M. Jensen, R.A. Opland, and A.M. Ryan
Reviewed By: Allison B. Siminovsky

Counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs) are those actions undertaken by the employee that are detrimental to the overall work environment.  The reasons for engaging in such behaviors and the means of expressing them differ from situation to situation, and as a result it can be difficult for organizations to pinpoint exactly what the causes of CWBs may be.  This article seeks to find antecedents for CWBs in organizational breaches of the psychological contract, or the employee’s inherent expectations about how the reciprocal relationship between employer and employee ought to be.   In other words, does deviant workplace behavior result from perceived organizational injustices and mistreatment?

The current study examines the possibility of numerous types of CWBs occurring as the result of a perceived breach of the psychological contract and achieved several significant findings.  For example, it was found that when employees are moved to retaliate to feeling a lost sense of their employers caring about them, they are most likely to engage in abuse behaviors, which include threatening and undermining one’s co-workers. 

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Do Organizations Ask What They Shouldn’t Ask in Job Applications?

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Topic: Fairness, Recruiting
Publication: International Journal of Selection and Assessment (DEC 2010)
Article: Science-practice gap in e-recruitment
Authors: A.L. Garcia-Izquierdo, H. Aguinis, and P.J. Ramos-Villagrasa
Reviewed By: Benjamin Granger

The gap between the science of HR and its practice in actual organizations is well known.  Sometimes, the practice of HR outpaces the research (e.g., organizations implement systems that are “hot” in the popular press, but not well understood or under researched), while in other cases, the practice of HR lags well behind the research…and sometimes even the law!

In a recent study, Garcia-Izquierdo et al. (2010) analyzed online job applications of over 60 publicly traded organizations – first in Spain in 2005, and again in 2009.  According to the authors, Spain provides a natural setting to study the science-practice gap in IO psychology because employment legislation regarding Equal Employment Opportunity is still ongoing (unlike in the U.S.).  Specifically, these dates were chosen due to recent legislation changes in 2007 (e.g., an Act prohibiting sex-based discrimination).  

Common information that was required of job applicants included age or date of birth, nationality, gender, marital status and place of birth.  About 20% of companies in 2005 even asked job applicants for personal photographs (this increased to 25% in 2009).  Overall, the percentages of companies asking applicants for such information did not change significantly from 2005 to 2009. 

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If You Want to Prevent Exhaustion … Don’t Worry, Be Happy!

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Topic:  Stress, Burnout, Performance, Fairness, Compensation
Publication: Journal of Organizational Behavior
Article: Emotional exhaustion and job performance: The moderating role of distributive justice and positive affect (AUG 2010)
Author: O. Janssen, C. K. Lam, & X. Huang
Reviewed by: Sarah Teague

Sometimes work is just exhausting; emotionally exhausting to be specific. Emotional exhaustion (EE) refers to feeling overwhelmed or drained at work. Not surprisingly, recent research has linked EE to decrements in performance through the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory. COR theory suggests that EE impairs performance because employees feel that they do not have the adequate resources to meet the current job demands, but is this always the case? When an employee begins to feel depleted, do they automatically attribute it to lack of personal resources? The authors of the current article suggest not.

The current study used COR and justice attributions (i.e. internal vs. external explanation for an event) to further explain how emotional exhaustion impacts job performance. Specifically, the authors proposed that emotional exhaustion will have a greater negative impact on performance when perceived distributive justice (DJ; adequate compensation for effort expended) is high. They reason that when DJ is high, employees attribute their depletion to personal inadequacies (internal) rather than poor compensation (external).

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